Welcome to the web side. Everything’s bonkers. Hard-earned software engineering truths get tossed out, because hey, wtf, I’ll just do some stuff and yippee. Feels like everyone’s stuck at year three of software engineering, and every three years the people get swapped out.

> every three years the people get swapped out

That's because they are being "replaced", in a sense!

When an industry doubles every 5 years like web dev was for a long time, that by the mathematical definition means that the average developer has 5 years or less experience. Sure, the old guard eventually get to 10 or 15 years of experience, but they're simply outnumbered by an exponentially growing influx of total neophytes.

Hence the childish attitude and behaviour with everything to do with JavaScript.

Good point! The web is going through its own endless September.

And so, it seems, is everything else. Perhaps, this commentary adds no value — just old man yells at cloud stuff.

The web saw "worse is better" and said "hold my beer"

We didn't get locking until npm v5 (some memory and googling, could be wrong.) And it took a long time to do everything you'd think you want.

Changing the main command `npm install` after 7 years isn't really "stable". Anyway didn't this replace versions, so locking won't have helped either?

You can’t replace existing versions on npm. (But probably more important is what @jffry mentioned – yes, lockfiles include hashes.)

> Anyway didn't this replace versions, so locking won't have helped either?

The lockfile includes a hash of the tarball, doesn't it?

It does, the answer to my question was no.