.npmignore is the opposite of `files`, it omits files when creating the package itself, that's different than trimming the files when the package is installed.

.npmignore is the opposite of `files`, it omits files when creating the package itself, that's different than trimming the files when the package is installed. That said, files/npmignore is the correct way to deal with this and you should never remove files from the packages you install without extremely good reasons, and when you do it, it should be very narrowly scoped and handled automatically as part of npm install. It should be totally valid to delete node_modules and reinstall everything without causing problems. This is also the biggest reason to never commit node_modules, aside from the pure insanity of commiting hundreds of thousands of vendor managed files and inviting merge conflicts when two branches change those files...