It's definitely Docker that's the problem. It's a well known problem, and people are working on solutions. It affects far more than NPM and Webpack.

> I've come to loath web frontend development.

Well, we don't have to do things this way just because everybody else does... developing "vanilla" Javascript is actually a pleasure especially with tools like Chrome's debugger. In my experience, front-end "frameworks" like Angular and React provide very little value and tons of unnecessary overhead.

Show me the team that's using vanilla JS, I'd like to sign up.

Same problem with PHP development, anyone trying to develop on windows for any real world framework will have epic IO lags, sometimes crashes with composer (equivalent to npm) and ALSO during execution time. Is this composer/PHP/Symfony-Laravel-whatever's fault ? Is it the caching lib fault ?

I work on linux, but try to onboard windows dev frequently ("windows dev", ikr ;) . The experience is always painful, and despite many efforts from the WSL team to move forward, docker for development on Windows is still barely usable right now ...