I don’t use NPM but if “Cache Assets” means what it means in the traditional sense, it wouldn’t affect most home deployments.
Historically, resources are limited and getting Apache to load images/javascript/CSS files from disk each time they’re requested, even if the OS kernel eventually caches them to RAM, was a resources intensive process. Reverse proxies stepped up and identifies assets (images, JS and CSS), and stores them in memory for subsequent requests. This reduces the load on the Apache web server and reduces the hops required to serve the request. Thereby making everything faster.
For homelabs, and single user systems, this is essentially irrelevant, as you’re not going to be putting so much load on the back end system to notice the difference. May be good to still turn it on, but if you’re noticing odd behaviors (ie updates to CSS or images not taking), it may be a good idea to turn it off to see if that’s the culprit.