I frequently have to rerun `npm i` when it fails for seemingly spurious reasons. We used to laugh at Windows years ago, when the solution was so often "turn it off and on again", but it's basically what you need to constantly do with tools like npm and webpack.
Yarn is much better in this regard. I'd thoroughly recommend it. It's drop-in compatible (except it will generate it's own lock file), so it's pretty easy to try it.
Yarn also gives much cleaner output. NPM is extremely verbose, but it seems that "verbosity" doesn't really confer any benefit. And yarn is also generally much faster.
