[jessaustin]

...what I'm talking about in this post is at least six months old...

Haha npm@3 was out June 2015. b^)

I agree that it would have been better, on balance, for previous versions to have created hard links to already-installed modules. Actually that wouldn't be a bad option to have even now, since debugging is often easier when one has a deep directory structure to explore rather than hundreds of random names in the top-level node_modules directory. That is, if I know the problem is in module foo, I can pushd to node_modules/foo, find the problematic submodule again, and repeat until I get all the way to the bottom. [EDIT: it occurs to me that having all these hard links would make e.g. dependency version updates easier, since un-updated dependencies wouldn't have to be recopied, unix-stow-style.]

To me, the more amusing file descriptor problem is caused by the module "chokidar", which when used in naive fashion tries to set up watches on all 360 files and directories created by itself and its own 55 dependencies. At that point it's real easy to run out of file watches altogether. Some of the utilities that call chokidar do so while ignoring node_modules, but many do not.