Yeah, yarn and co came about because npm was slow, buggy and didn't honor its own lockfile.

Nowadays it is mostly improved, and the others differentiate by enchantments to workspaces (better monorepo support) or more aggressive caching by playing games with where the installed packages physically exist on the system.

The core functionality- what a package is- has always been the same across the package managers though, because the runtime behavior is defined by node, not the package manager.