This is such a wild take. I’m constantly running into issues with bundler and literally never have issues with npm or yarn. Not to mention the amount of innovation happening within that world with module resolution algorithms.
Do you mind sharing some details? This doesn't match my experiences at all really - while I think running into messes with NPM is sometimes a little overstated, the number of times I've needed to do something drastic like `rm -rf node_modules` is not insignificant and I've never had to do anything at all like that with Bundler.
The only problem I can really think of is working through issues when two gems require different irreconcilable versions of a library, and that's more of a fundamental ruby issue / design choice than a problem with bundler itself.
I have had to use older versions of npm on unsupported nodejs. There was no pinning, or guard rails with upgrading. I have borked the entire npm install doing that because the later npm wanted to use newer syntax that was not backwards compatible.
What you and I describe is not a bundler or npm problem so much that the software we are working on requires an outdated version of ruby and nodejs.
I agree with the the other comment though — npm has more problems even when with the latest version. Like Nodejs, it is flawed by design.
