Some use ‘pnpm’ package manager, alternative to default, where the packages are downloaded once to a central location, and per project directory, it links to the original location so files aren’t duplicated saving space

node_modules might take a lot of space on a dev machine, but as op said, only the files used are packed into web artifacts that are deployed.

So 12gbs can end up as 10mb, arbitrary number to highlight significance of tree shaking.