there’s at least one guy i know of on github whose claim to fame is he finds code in existing node codebases by big corpos that’s duplicated, breaks it out into a library, then PRs the original codebase with “instead of doing <this part> manually, switch to depending on this library”, then adds to his profile “my code is used by <big corpo>”. he had thousands of libraries like that last i checked, most of them less than ten lines of code. the manifest and other boilerplate is way larger than the actual code.

Your node_modules directory can get so bloated that the community came up with different package managers just for deduplication! pnpm, for example, makes one global-adjacent cache, and then just symlinks the dependencies as needed. This is because the regular npm doesn’t, because what if the package changed between the 20ms since I downloaded it for nuxt? (Sorry Nuxt users, had to pick a name)