I'm new to the .NET Core framework and currently setting up a dashboard that uses Razor pages and some JavaScript interactions. For the few example projects I've created none of them came with a package manager from the get go, which imho is needed to keep the application maintainable. Coming from Node.js an Ruby on Rails background my default solution is NPM (or Yarn if you want).
I noticed however that Microsoft excluded Node from their base Docker images for .Net about 2 years ago (see here: https://github.com/aspnet/Announcements/issues/298).
This led me to questioning my solution to use NPM and I went looking for alternatives. I found that you can install Javascript libraries by wrapping them in Nuget packages and installing them via Nuget. But I'm hesitant to go this way as I've seen this pattern causing issues in Ruby on Rails. It adds an extra layer of maintenance and often the Ruby Gems where no longer maintained, meaning you're unable to move to the newest versions.
Then we have Libman, which is integrated into Visual Studio (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/client-side/libman/libman-vs?view=aspnetcore-2.2) and draws packages from https://cdnjs.com, which I believe contains less packages (but according to Microsoft has everything you need). But their own blog (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/aspnet/library-manager-client-side-content-manager-for-web-apps/) says:
LibMan is not a package management system. If you’re happily using npm/yarn/(or something else), we encourage you to continue doing so. LibMan was not developed as a replacement for these tools. For example, the SPA templates (i.e. Angular and React) we ship for ASP.NET Core depend on npm and WebPack, and we have no plans to change that.
Then we're left with Bower, which is no longer an option, from https://bower.io/:
...psst! While Bower is maintained, we recommend using Yarn and Webpack or Parcel for front-end projects read how to migrate!
So I wonder, for a monolith app, is NPM or Yarn still the right choice and if so, why did Microsoft decide to exclude Node from their base images?
You mentioned LibMan which works just fine, but you need to configure it to download packages from unpkg which is a CDN for NPM and should contain everything that you can find on npm.