When I said "bad old days" I mean a previous iteration, not the state today. I'm talking about the early days of npm.
In the early days of npm a lot of install examples would do global installs, you'd often end up with a confusing mess in npm.
Nowadays people are much better at only doing project level installs and even correctly telling you whether to have it as a dev dependency or not.
Ah sorry that makes sense!! Yeah, that's exactly what how I feel too. It's sad that npm has improved so much while Python's packaging hasn't (not by default at least, whereas npm is basically a default in js projects by now), in the same time frame.