Except when you need libraries from npm, and then you have a choice 1) use npm: imports and watch things not work 2) use esm.sh imports and watch supposedly-immutable URLs change their contents all the time, and be ready to pile on kludges to get transitive dependencies to behave.

Bartek from the Deno team here. You can also use `package.json` and bare specifiers with Deno. We also recently added `--unstable-byonm` flag (Bring Your Own Node Modules) that allows you to manage `node_modules/` be the package manager of your choice. In other words, you should be able to drop Deno into an existing Node project.

I have had mixed results when using NPM libraries, but I also haven't run into any cases yet where I absolutely needed them

Some stuff you might reach out to NPM for is built into Deno's standard library. Other stuff has become built-in JS language features over the years. And the ecosystem, while nowhere near as big as NPM's, seems to have all the most important stuff at this point, at least for back-end work

And if I have to fill gaps by reinventing some small wheels here and there, or by interning and converting an NPM library, that's still worth it to me to avoid all the tooling headaches