Lock files protect you from the version changing out from under you, but modules disappearing from NPM is a thing that happens. Yes, you can use artifactory or

Lock files protect you from the version changing out from under you, but modules disappearing from NPM is a thing that happens. Yes, you can use artifactory or similar as a proxy but that requires infrastructure that you may not want to run. That is all to say: there are situations where committing node_modules is the least evil.