[Tainnor]

You don't need to stash deps in a subdirectory, IMHO that's a node.js design flaw that leads to tons of duplication. I don't think there's any other package manager for a popular language that works like this by default (Bundlers does allow you to version dependencies which can be useful for deployment, but you still only ever get one version of any dependency unlike node).

You just need to have some sort of wrapper/program that knows how to figure out which dependencies to use for a project. With bundler, you just wrap everything in "bundle exec" (or use binstubs).

[marcosdumay]

What was unique to node.js was the decision to not only store the dependencies in a sub-folder, but also to apply that rule, recursively, for every one of the projects you add as a dependency.

There are many dependency managers that use a project-local flat storage, and a global storage was really frowned upon until immutable versions and reliable identifiers became popular some 10 years ago.