[acemarke]

The point is that build tools take up disk space, and need to be installed. IDEs like XCode and Visual Studio bring along large quantities of libraries, headers, and other aspects of a C++ / C# / Swift / $LANG build toolchain.

Front-end web dev now consists in large part of building highly interactive applications, not just static sites. That requires tooling. Therefore, it's not unreasonable to expect that the necessary tools will take up space, and there's plenty of prior precedent from other languages.