Individual NPM modules seem way too granular for individual distro packaging. apt(1) et al are just not built to handle sources with 10mm packages, or systems that want 100k packages installed.
Also, Node's require() works in such a way that you can require(foo-1.0) and require(bar-1.0), and then bar can require(foo-1.1) and that works, and you end up with your module and the bar module each having their own version of the foo module loaded into the Node runtime.
Distros really aren't set up to handle that: a distro expects a package should be able to be upgraded independently by the sysadmin to whatever the newest version is. There are one-off hacks done for each of the (very few) packages that are set up to run "beside themselves", like python2 and python3, by making them entirely separate packages; but having "foo-1.0" and "foo-1.1" together is basically impossible.
Both of those problems are basically pointing in the same direction: that distro-level packaging and development-dependency-level packaging are semantically different acts and trying to map a package-hierarchy 1:1 from one to the other just doesn't make sense.
It makes far more sense to me, personally, to vendor all the development-time deps of an app or framework into that app or framework, and then package that whole release bundle into a distro package and sign that.
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Or, to put that another way:
npm(1) is meant to be a build tool, in the same way that make(1) is a build tool. It makes perfect sense for building a Debian package to require calling npm(1), just like it makes sense for it to require calling make(1).
But npm(1) shouldn't need to be there on the deployed system, just like make(1) or any other part of the compilation toolchain shouldn't need to be installed just to install and use binary packages.
> distro-level packaging and development-dependency-level packaging are semantically different acts
This is a good point, but it also seems that distros have a fairly clunky naming convention that makes many useful cases of multiple side-by-side versions seem more clunky than they actually are.
