[xienze]

Isn’t that because every Node dependency stores its own dependencies within itself? So you could literally end up with multiple copies of the exact same version of the same library.

I’ve never understood why they didn’t go with the Maven approach: all dependencies stored in a central location, separated by version.

[dhritzkiv]

I believe the same version (within a specified semver range) are hoisted and stored in the root of ./node_modules. Differing versions are nested within the consuming packages and therefore duplicated.

This can be particularly bad when a popular package has a semver major change (even if, for example, support for an outdated version of node is dropped), many libraries will lag behind in updating to the latest major version and you will have many duplicated copies of a popular package.