As I said, if you are building a template for Wordpress, you don't really need NPM to do it (you can of course, but should you ?).
There is a lot of upside/downside to NPM/Node, largly covered by smart people on the internet. The real question is "is NPM the simple solution to do X ?". And sometimes the answer is just "no, because it's over engineering the stuff".
The more I work in web development, the more I think we forgot the KISS rule to fancy tools.
To be fair, in my experience, even with less technically savvy clients I'm seeing less and less interest in WordPress. I'm well aware that it's still very, very popular with a lot of people, but in terms of where the work and the money is I just can't see it.
I did WordPress based work a few years ago but I can't see any realistic way I could be doing that now and making any reasonable amount of money, because the reality is that just about anyone can do it, and if a company is going to pay a developer they'd rather pay them to develop something better suited to what they're doing.
There is a lot of upside/downside to NPM/Node, largly covered by smart people on the internet. The real question is "is NPM the simple solution to do X ?". And sometimes the answer is just "no, because it's over engineering the stuff".
The more I work in web development, the more I think we forgot the KISS rule to fancy tools.