For many years I was using yarn with 0 issue on massive monorepos, and every year I'd hear people hyping pnpm, I'd try and switch, run into multiple bugs often open issues in pnpm itself, yes even without their link strategy, then give up and wait. After about 3 years of this I gave up and never tried again.

This is quite spammy; you could mitigate it by explaining what you think the "needless suffering" is. Having been using npm, pnpm, and yarn for many years the only benefit I find with pnpm is a little bit of speed when using the cli, but not enough that I notice; I've outlined the major yarn benefit to me 'in a peer comment' (which I didn't realise was you when I answered) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47415660

I expect yarn to have a real competitor sooner rather than later that will replace it; and I do wonder if it is this vfs module that will enable it.

I just use npm because I like to stay as vanilla as possible. Glad that alternatives exist though.