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Ahh, interesting, I wasn't aware of that issue. Personally the problem with npm for me has never been "the node_modules directory is too big" or "npm is non-deterministic" but rather "the quality of other people's code is terrible" or "this library solves 99 other cases in addition to the one I care about".

I think if you're careful about what you pull in from npm it's totally fine.

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Having deterministic builds is a godsent boon in an ecosystem without proper semantic versioning enforcement. The fact that minor version number changes can be breaking means that every build can break (a bit tautological but a point worth emphasizing).

I also dont like that some packages are too big, or too small, or have too many transitive dependencies. It is a fact of life in npm land, though, making deterministic builds simultaneously minor and significant.

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