The problem isn’t with NodeJS or NPM, it’s the developers that are so willing to use horrible frameworks/libraries/tooling that is just simply not needed. NodeJS gives you so much out of the box, and NPM is simply a place to store your packages. With Deno, you won’t even need a package manager as it takes a step closer to go modules approach.
If you’re going to use React, TypeScript, NextJs, Webpack, Styled Components, Material UI, Jest, and the 10k dependencies that comes with it, then yeah, your dev environment is going to be slow, bloated, and incredibly frustrating to work with. Not to mention have security issues. I’ve literally just done a fresh create-react-app installation (latest version 5.0.1 as I write this), and boom, 6 high severity vulnerabilities.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Choose lightweight libraries that do one thing really well, and build your project from the ground up yourself.