A big part is the development toolchain, which would be installed at a system level for most languages. I started a vue project last night, npm install --produ

A big part is the development toolchain, which would be installed at a system level for most languages. I started a vue project last night, npm install --production installs 4 packages. With dev dependencies, I get 2300 packages. Eslint, babel, webpack, etc bring in lots of luggage BTW, I think 19000 is wrong, on a fresh node_modules I get: $ npm install gatsby ... + gatsby@2.20.18 added 1773 packages from 733 contributors and audited 23706 packages in 52.317s $ du -sh node_modules 245M node_modules Not sure where the "audited" number comes from, but its not the number of install packages. I get 2737 directories containing a package.json, 1477 of which are uniq. `debug` appears 32 times!