I've had several experiences with Node.js contractors handing over "finished" applications that were only configured to run under webpack-dev-server[0]
It clearly tells you in the README it's not for production, but I have this recurrent discussion with developers who tell me they have only ever run Node.js this way.
What that tells me is there is quite a trend a towards exactly what you describe, where a lot of what gets written never goes into production.