This is &quot;normal&quot; mostly to projects where the development team has little general development experience and in particular little exposure to how software is developed away from the JS ecosystem.<p>In fairness, plenty of people have long warned that recent trends in the JS ecosystem were unhealthy. It&#x27;s always been possible to run useful modern tools like Browserify and SASS directly, without all the build systems and task runners and other such tools, and plenty of development teams do, and those teams don&#x27;t run into NPM hell to the same extent.