This is not true. Installing Node on Ubuntu with a package manager using the official instructions [0] installs both Node and npm.

If you are using an unofficial repository, and that maintainer did not include npm in his Node package, then yes I would consider that a problem.

> to install the latter it wants to get about a hundred of dependencies

Yeah, as software engineers, let's discourage code reuse, shall we?

Node and npm are not trivial pieces of software. I expect it to have lots of dependencies. This is hardly surprising.

[0] https://nodejs.org/en/download/package-manager#debian-and-ub...