It's mostly a result of trying to avoid duplication. It's a non-issue for a server running one service but quite relevant on, for example, a dev workstation wit

It's mostly a result of trying to avoid duplication. It's a non-issue for a server running one service but quite relevant on, for example, a dev workstation with dozens of projects or for smaller tools – imagine if every system command brought it's own dependencies. But the trend seems to go towards sacrificing disk space for isolation, i. e. NPM which makes it more or less impossible to use a system-wide 'node_modules'.