NPM 5.x that comes with the Node.js 8 package hangs after running

I installed node 8 via yum on our AS/400 with 7.3 and running NPM doesn't work all that well, yet.

NPM does not throw an error, it works just fine and does everything it is supposed to do but at the end it simply hangs never returning the user back to their shell. I tried running it with the --verbose flag to see what's happening and this is the output:

$ npm init -y --verbose
npm info it worked if it ends with ok
npm verb cli [ '/QOpenSys/pkgs/lib/nodejs8/bin/node',
npm verb cli   '/QOpenSys/pkgs/bin/npm',
npm verb cli   'init',
npm verb cli   '-y',
npm verb cli   '--verbose' ]
npm info using npm@6.2.0
npm info using node@v8.11.3
Wrote to /home/user/code/package.json:

{
  "name": "code",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "",
  "main": "index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
  },
  "keywords": [],
  "author": "",
  "license": "ISC"
}

npm info init written successfully
npm verb exit [ 0, true ]

The RPM package installs NPM 5.x and in an attempt to fix the issue, I upgraded to npm 6.2.

We got the same npm version running just fine on 7.2.

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