In other words, can it replace Bower?
I thought Bower was officially dead being lack of maintenance. And npm sure can do it thanks to Browserify and Webpack which supports CommonJS.
Why not. I like to use npm modules directly to manage client side resources:
Yes. I mostly load dependencies via npm and compile my assets into file(s) that i can then use on the web. Thanks to tools like gulp, the workflow is easier to manage.
Claudio Mezzasalma
Senior Software Engineer @ Eurotech
Yes, and a lot of common projects use it nowadays as a Bower replacement.