It would be really nice if many newer languages didn't act like they existed in a vacuum and no prior art existed. Package management was by no means new at the point NPM was being developed, and if they didn't have enough people with experience with the nasty edge cases package managers in other languages had discovered, it would have been trivial to solicit advice from the architects of the package systems for other languages. If there's one thing software engineers love, it's talking about crazy situations where nobody considered this weird edge case and how they had to scramble to fix it (I know I do).

I think we've thankfully gotten to a spot where there's enough users and developers of modern programming languages with experience in other languages that we're seeing good cross-pollination at the language design level (e.g. async/await is quickly being adopted by many languages as either a core feature or through a library that's popular). That just doesn't seem to have happened yet with the architecture around the languages yet.