I've started to feel it is much more an npm problem than a node problem. One of the things I've started leaning on more is prioritizing packages from JSR [0]. JSR is a part of Deno's efforts, so is often easiest to use in Deno packages, but most of the things with high scores on JSR get cross-published to npm and the few that prefer JSR only there's an alright JSR bridge to npm.

Of course using more JSR packages does start to add more reason to prefer Deno to Node. Also, there are still some packages that are deno.land/x/ only (sort of the first version of JSR, but no npm cross-compatibility) worth checking out. For instance, I've been impressed with Lume [1], a thoughtful SSG that's sort of the opposite of Astro in that it iterates at a slow, measured pace, and doesn't try to be a kitchen sink but more of workbench with a lot of tools easy to find. It's deno.land/x/ only for now for reasons I don't entirely agree with but I can't deny that JSR can be quite a step up in publishing complexity for not exactly obvious gain.

[0] https://jsr.io/

[1] https://lume.land/