How to updating dependencies of dependencies using npm

The problem is the depth. From the documentation:

As of [email protected], the npm update will only inspect top-level packages. Prior versions of npm would also recursively inspect all dependencies. To get the old behavior, use npm --depth 9999 update.

So we have to provide the depth that we want to update. In my case a 9999 took to long and I canceled it. But a --depth 5 was enough.

npm update --depth 5

I also needed to manually change the minimist version to "^1.2.5" from "0.0.8" for the dependency of "mkdirp"