This isn't an npm exclusive issue. A dependency having some other transitive deps also depend on an older version is a problem that happens in literally every other ecosystem. If anything, npm gives you more escape hatches by actually allowing you to run multiple versions concurrently if you need to or selectively overriding parts of your transitive dependency graph.

What package management system has a solution to this? Even so called "stable" platforms like Maven deal with this nonsense by publishing new versions under a new namespace (like Apache Commons did from v2 to v3).