npm is terrible

It's hard for me to believe in the quality of a piece of software that behaves like this:

$ npm install [package]
  npm ERR! Please try running this command again as root/Administrator. 
$ npm install [package]
  (OK)

I'm sure about five years ago npm was a useful and reliable piece of software. Perhaps I remember incorrectly.

I had another tale of npm woe last week when after runing `npm install`, my node_modules/package-name was a symlink to none other than node_modules/package-name. For some reason, downgrading npm to version 3 (from version 5) made it all work properly.

I groaned today when I had to install yarn, yet another package manager, to install something else, but the sooner something sane replaces npm the better.