forked #nodejs at 25.9 as my lifeboat from it becoming another clown show

it does offer me the opportunity to imagine a world with nodejs but without the npm ecosystem.

npm's just a package manager that runs on node. you don't have to use it.

it might be possible to build a better, saner toolchain leveraging some of the existing affordances (package.json, node_modules, etc) as a compat layer