Valid criticisms, but the "standard" choices all work well. Nvm is the de facto standard for node version management, npm is a totally satisfactory package manager, node is the standard runtime that those other runtimes try to be compatible with, etc.

Will also note that in my years of js experience I've hardly ever run into module incompatibilities. It's definitely gnarly when it happens, but wouldn't consider this to be the same category of problem as the confusion of setting up python.

Hopefully uv can convince me that python's environment/dependency management can be easier than JavaScript's. Currently they both feel bad in their own way, and I likely prefer js out of familiarity.