I thought I heard somewhere that an upcoming version of sdfcli will be released as a npm package? would that just be a node wrapper around the existing cli-20xx-y.jar ? or are we talking, completely re-implemented?

Yes, it wil be an open source project available as npm package. For now what i can say is that, it will be a hybrid solution. We can arrange a short demo to give you a sneak peak if you are interested.