This recent reddit thread reveals discontent among the web development community about the sheer volume of stuff in a typical node_modules
dir. 140MB in this case!
Opinions in the thread varied from "I'm surprised npm even works" to "everything is fine". I'm not going to offer an opinion, just these two observations:
node_modules
dirs typically do contain lots of stuff that doesn't need to be there.- The latest version mitigates overall size by flattening the dependency tree, but some of the bloat is beyond npm's control.