alt Hacker NewsNPM packages doesn’t take up that much disk space for me with standard pnpm deduplication. The much bigger offender for me is Rust target dir: when people talk about vibe coding in Rust for performance, what they don’t mention (at least I’ve hardly ever seen it mentioned) is every trivial little tool pushes 1GB on disk and anything slightly nontrivial easily racks up multi-GB. Which hurts when you have lots of vibed small tools. I wonder if anyone bothered to look into this problem.
I think the parent was referring to hosting the entire NPM registry, not having a project that uses NPM. In that case there's substantial duplication from version to version.