Dependencies are hoisted, meaning they get installed in the root node_modules folder. This is done for performance reasons: if a dependency is shared by multiple packages, it gets saved only once in the root.

The local package will be copied to the prefix (./node-modules).

It’s an incredibly amount of overhead and waste. Packages increasingly consume more hard drive space, increase installation times

The downside is the installation files are bigger than the traditional Debian package manager (DEB) files. They also use more hard drive real estate. With snaps, every application that needs a particular resource installs its own copy. This isn’t the most efficient use of hard drive space. Although hard drives are getting bigger and cheaper, traditionalists still balk at the extravagance of each application running in its own mini-container. Launching applications is slower, too.

Storage is not an issue, I’ve explained why it’s not. There could and should be improvements on that area, but this is not a relevant issue.

Disk space is an issue. Resource usage is an issue. Those new packages nowadays need huge amount of storage to finally do the exact same thing as their older and lighter deb counterpart. Whatever the price of storage, it’s the opposite of a progress, it’s not optimal at all.

Applications like rsnapshot rotate a snapshot to the next level by creating a hard-linked copy. Creating a hard-linked copy may seem like a good idea but it is still a waste of disk space, since only files can be hard-linked and not directories. The duplicated directory structure can take up as much as 100 MB of space.