It absolutely has to created node_modules in center of your source code, and populate it with 120MB of files. If you want to just package it somehow so to make it more like cli tool (like you could do with awscli for example) then tough luck it will break in many weird ways.

It's like the nodejs people threw out everything we learned in decades and are reinventing the wheel. Yes it works great if you have your own project in a single directory and working on it, but any other use case is a horrible experience.