There's a philosophical disagreement here. It's true, developers are expensive. But I think it's a fallacy that what's less efficient for a computer is better for a developer. The npm-style dependency tree enables and encourages much more complexity, which developers then have to deal with when debugging or deploying. They need new tools to help them get a handle on the huge number of modules. That's more expensive than a system kept more "under control".
> I think it's a fallacy that what's less efficient for a computer is better for a developer.
I don't think that was ever said; I claimed that trading disk space for developer hours is a good trade-off in this case.
> The npm-style dependency tree enables and encourages much more complexity, which developers then have to deal with when debugging or deploying.
I don't believe this is the case. When developing an app (as opposed to a library) it's considered a best practice to check your node modules into source control, ensuring that there's never a mismatch between installed dependencies on developer machines. If you don't want to do that, you take what comes - but even before I picked up on that, I never ran into issues even when collaborating with 5+ developers. You just need to make sure your package.json locks your versions appropriately.
