Won't this effectively prevent an application to start if it cannot reach the internet? I haven't done much development with Node, but I've seen similar pattern

Won't this effectively prevent an application to start if it cannot reach the internet? I haven't done much development with Node, but I've seen similar patterns with Java applications that attempt to pull in an XSD at start up, only to fail to boot completely, because the application server doesn't have direct internet access. It's a bit of a weird feature, which should only be used for a very limited number of project, in a niche which I'm not completely able to identify.