Perhaps they only used it at the very beginning, when network requests were horribly broken, to the point that you couldn't even do an npm install. I haven't had any issues lately with NPM however.
I initially had problems with max character length for paths. When npm installed dependencies really deep down, Windows became unable to move or delete such files. I think it's been fixed with Yarn's flat dependency structure, which I think npm has also gone or is going to in the near future.
Npm is broken for example, it's apath exception when it looks into the os api. It expects linux defaults. The npm guys are trying to f8x it last i saw. Shame the module causes that. Itll trinkle down to many other Tools.
