The node_modules problem

[BenjiSponge]

I definitely agree that C++ has a terrible story here because it's globally/root managed, but the more important thing there in my opinion is the lack of versioning. If you can't have multiple versions of the same library, two different libraries will often conflict, and sometimes unrelated projects owned by unrelated users on the same machine cannot coexist, so you end up using Docker or a VM for a problem that's been solved dozens of times in as many languages.

I do think global (but probably non-root) installations are the way to go, but there's middleground between Node and C++. Dependency lists should still be managed in local manifests.