NPM + Gulp or how not to go crazy?

Question

npm

Listen, why is npm or gulp such buggy shit?
It constantly tells me that gulp is not found, try npm install gulp - although it is naturally installed.
Okay, I put it once again - both locally and globally - all packages that are locally installed in node_modules fall off. They have to be placed one by one again!
After that, it will start successfully a couple of times (well, how successful ... it will show some other errors) and again it will say - gulp was not found, try installing it.
Then I just removed node_modules and did npm install --dev. Well, it should, as it were, put everything that is in package.json in dev dependencies. Should, in theory. It put something there, but when you run gulp-tasks, it says I can’t find either that package or another. Putting them back on by hand...
A few runs later... that's right - can't find gulp!
I put gulp - Cannot find module 'browserify' and so on for all modules.
And I have already passed this circle 4-5 times.
I used to deal with Gulp, but this is the first time.
Under Windows, if that.
PS What is curious - in the process of all these manipulations, the size of the node_modules folder randomly jumps between 3 and 60 mb. And I didn't notice any pattern. Either more or less.
PPS The problem is not solved, but localized on NPM. Some nonsense is going on inside the local node_modules folder. Either something is incorrectly overwritten in it, or the devil knows. And Gulp itself is most likely just a symptom - the global gulp is run, the error is thrown when the line tries to connect the local gulp.
const gulp = require('gulp');

Answer 1

Forgot to write the summary of the story. It seems that the reason was in the buggy NPM 5.0 - after updating to 5.3, the problem (seemingly) went away.

Answer 2

I ran into a similar problem not too long ago. After the update, npm began to periodically lose write permissions to the local node_modules folder, as a result, half of the packages turned out to be uninstalled. It was discovered by accident and for a couple of days it was crutched by launching everything that was possible from the administrator. I never found out the reason, I returned to my Linux and the old version of npm.