[wgoodall01]

I feel that this isn't quite a fair comparison.

Take any other language with a web framework---Ruby with Rails, Java with Play/Spring, any web server which exposes a CGI interface, Python with Django/flask/whatever---and you will find a colossal amount of framework code behind the simple "hello, world!" demo.

Web apps are complex things, especially when the framework has to account for common cross-cutting concerns and patterns elegantly and succinctly. The fact that the JS ecosystem with NPM exposes that complexity to the user directly with an (albeit massive) node_modules installation isn't a strike against node per se: other languages have this code too, they just don't stash it all in the same folder as your project.

If you want to criticize the JS ecosystem, doing it on the basis of sheer SLOC downloaded by an `npm install` isn't too great.

We can talk about the quality of these packages, or about code review standards, or about the unique challenges auditing code from many sources for bugs and security problems. But talking about how the framework code gets installed seems counterproductive.