I guess it’s because I do C++ and robotics. But npm is just not part of my world. The only time I come across it is when someone gets real lazy and doesn’t ship a proper single exe distributable. Claude Code and Codex CLIs were both naughty on initial release. But are now a single file distributable the way the lord intended.
I guaranteed way for me to NOT try a piece of software is if the first setup step is “npm install…”