The NPM ecosystem is huge, but it's also full of poorly-coded crap, rife with vulerabilites, subject to supply-chain risks, etc.

And much of its convenience comes from the fact that it has a huge set of off-the-shelf libraries for doing things that are properly part of your higher-level business logic, rather than lower-level foundation code, anyway -- those kinds of libraries are popular because they maximize developer velocity, not because they should be third-party dependencies.

The kind of stuff that makes sense to include as libraries, e.g. code dealing with foundation-level building blocks, like standard encryption algorithms, audio and video codecs, compression, etc. is exactly where the reference implementations and baseline libraries are all in C in the first place.

The point here is that, ultimately, C won't take longer if you're using an LLM. Eventually, you'll get more performant, more secure code targeting the lowest level possible, and mucking around with stuff like NPM is what will both slow you down and produce worse results.