I have quite recently begun work on an open source project with a node back-end and front-end work planned to be done in React. This is my first full effort to work with the latest and greatest in JavaScript tooling. We use Ext JS and Sencha Cmd at work and, whatever else you want to say about that stack, it is different. My last full blown front-end development was before the real Node boom and I pretty much did it the old fashioned way -- namely, downloading minified JavaScript by hand and referencing it in my markup (shaddup ya whippersnappers).
JavaScript saw a real explosion in package managers a few years ago, which was a natural place to go from a growing ecosystem to have none. Market forces naturally took over and many of the earlier examples have been culled out of existence. There are really two main options at this point: NPM and Bower. Bower has enjoyed a healthy following, but (by my entirely unscientific survey), it appears as though the NPM uber alles faction within the JavaScript world is growing stronger.
The sentiment is echoed in other places, but http://blog.npmjs.org/post/101775448305/npm-and-front-end-packaging gives a good overview of the fundamental syllogism. It basically goes that package management is hard, NPM is large and established, so you should use NPM everywhere rather than splitting package managers.
The argument has a certain intrinsic appeal - after all, the fewer package managers, the better, right?
The real problem is that it is possible to use NPM as a front-end package manager, but it is deeply unpleasant. Systems like Browserify and Webpack are needed to prepare dependencies for usage on the front-end. These are complex and, to a degree, brittle (I ran into https://github.com/Dogfalo/materialize/issues/1422 while attempting to use Materialize with an NPM application).
Even if one assumes that every package can ultimately be Browserified (and it doesn't seem like an overly-optimistic assumption), the effort seems to be pure waste. Why would I spend time writing complex descriptors for modules on top of their existing packages? For it's shortcomings, Bower seems more robust. I spent a few hours fiddling with Browserify and Materialize without much success (although I think I do see how browserify would work now), but mere minutes wiring up Bower.
This does not get into the fact that Browserify/Webpack require additional information to extract CSS, images and web fonts. Even when things are working, it would require constant effort to keep it all up to date.
At the moment, NPM, even NPM 3, simply does not have good answers for setting up front-end development. The NPM proponents really, in my opinion, need to focus on making front-end modules more effective rather than pushing tools that are little more than hacks, like Browserify and Webpack. At this point, I am just going to rock out with Bower. Maybe someday I will be able to trim out Bower -- but I would rather spend time coding my application than giving NPM some TLC.