I got to the conclusion that boring is good enough, for me NPM is the best tool, is not that fast, but the installation speed is not that bad, considering how many times I need to run from scratch, the difference does not matter, it is stable and it's the default Node package manager, so I don't need to bother to install in CI any other tool, etc. My experience for long living projects is to stick with the defaults, because in a few years third party tools will change, it happen to my team with Yarn classic, now that we are with vanilla Node and NPM no worries, same with 3rd party dependencies, just use as less as possible.