So it looks like NPM has wanted in it’s development.
An new fork has entered the ring, NPMPlus.
Now, it touts continued development and an easy transfer from NPM to NPMPlus through a one-time assignment of your original directory. This probably would have worked if I didn’t set mine up to use mariadb instead of the built in flat files or sqlite.
That said, I wasn’t silly enough to just wipte out my NPM setup. I did make use of the alt ports available in NPMPlus’s compose.yaml file so I could copy setting over manually, which worked just fine.