I’m a newbie in Node.js and not really familiar with the whole npm ecosystem. I honestly didn’t expect that a single npm install would explode into ~10MB spread across ~30 different folders. After a few minutes of staring at it, I realized what’s actually inside those folders: not just runtime code. What shocked me Inside node_modules you get everything: README files source files tests examples docs And then the next level of madness: modules inside modules . Duplicated dependencies nested multiple levels deep (e.g. inherits , core-util-is , tedious …), even if they already exist elsewhere in the project tree. Here’s a typical example: I’m in node_modules → package bl , and there’s another node_modules folder inside it, plus test , README and other “junk”… all for a ~10KB JS file. The obvious assumption (that turned out wrong) Once I accepted the chaos, I assumed there must be a “build for production” command that would “compile” depende...