Deno caches local copies and offer control on when to reload them. in term of vendoring you can simply download everything yourself and use local paths for imports.
How would this work with transitive dependencies? Sure I can control which parts I import myself, but how do I keep a vendored file from pulling in another URL a level deeper?
Unlike node, recommended deno practice is to check-in your dependencies to the VCS.
> Production software should always bundle its dependencies. In Deno this is done by checking the $DENO_DIR into your source control system, and specifying that path as the $DENO_DIR environmental variable at runtime.
Ah from that perspective I can see how this might appear to be better. Personally, I like the 'magic' of NPM (which to be honest I don't really think is all that magical, it's quite transparent what's happening behind the scenes). This 'magic' means I no longer have to write 200 line makefiles, so it definitely makes my life easier.
Some of that convenience will still be included, a couple of things that deno will do differently from node will be that there is no standard index.* file to load and import path include the extension.
