NPM used to be reaaaaaallly bad due to lack of lockfiles and how it used to handle diamond dependencies
Added to the propencity of JS projects to have a ton of deps...
It has mostly been sorted out by all package managers. The node_modules debacle is still a hotly contested topic, it creates a lot of problems, but it also solves a lot of them compared to alternative approaches.
Then you have install performance which is mostly fine by now in all package managers, but if you really have problems with it you can use pnpm or yarn2.
As the python ecosystem grows and dependency trees move away from "django only" you can see they having the same types of problems that JS used to have.
It has mostly been sorted out by all package managers. The node_modules debacle is still a hotly contested topic, it creates a lot of problems, but it also solves a lot of them compared to alternative approaches.
Then you have install performance which is mostly fine by now in all package managers, but if you really have problems with it you can use pnpm or yarn2.
As the python ecosystem grows and dependency trees move away from "django only" you can see they having the same types of problems that JS used to have.