It sounds to me like you're lacking a fundamental understanding of what's in node_modules. The lion's share of it is related to the dev environment and build sy

It sounds to me like you're lacking a fundamental understanding of what's in node_modules. The lion's share of it is related to the dev environment and build system, very little of it is actually "source" that gets bundled into the output. What you're saying is basically the equivalent of including the size of the JDK in with a Java project.