If every package was 40 MB on my computer, my distribution would be 30 GB.
More importantly, these 40 MB of code and resources expand to about 400 MB in memory when the application is running, but a global library wouldn't fix that.
>If every package was 40 MB on my computer, my distribution would be 30 GB.
Only if you had installed 750 userland programs. Which are quite a lot. And even then, 30GB for your OS + your third party programs is negligible in even a 265GB flask disk (merely 12% of it).
>More importantly, these 40 MB of code and resources expand to about 400 MB in memory when the application is running, but a global library wouldn't fix that.
Not sure where you got those metrics. Code doesn't "expand" on memory, and binary size it's not a reliable metric of how much memory it will use (a trivial 5 line program that just mallocs can use TB of memory).
For the majority of very large programs, most of the size on disk is assets, not compiled code.
You are correct that code doesn't "expand on memory" but there is no fixed relationship between code size and memory usage. You could certainly write a tiny program that uses a ton of memory pretty easily.
Electron consumes 117MB, npm takes 50MB, and gulp is consuming 114MB, although I don't know how much of this value is shared between the processes (since there are 40+ of them).
More importantly, these 40 MB of code and resources expand to about 400 MB in memory when the application is running, but a global library wouldn't fix that.