[jakejake]

Providing an option to install with npm simply makes it more convenient for those devs who already use it - which surely is not an insignificant number. Nothing is requiring you to work that way or stopping you from downloading the files manually.

I just started to use npm (and indeed package managers in general) for my work recently and it's opened my eyes. It makes sense to me that this will be the preferred way of working for every dev/designer. Just as we mostly all use git now. It's hard to imagine that time when we just shared files via FTP and didnt use version control. I'd encourage anybody like me who was resistant, or working on a large code base that doesn't use those tools - give it a fair try on a side project.