As an aside, I badly miss the Github language statistics in gitlab repositories. This is one of the crucial info for any developer browsing through new repos and it is very counter-intuitive to have this info hidden from homepage.
I agree it's not very prominent. (GitLab Inc. developer)
If you want to mirror your dependencies, run an npm mirror subset or something. If that sounds crazy to you, that's because mirroring npm dependencies is unnecessary for virtually everybody.
Oh, and you are also making your .git folder 100x larger than it otherwise would be, making your initial download and on-disk sizes a lot bigger, which can also slow down other git operations. Not to mention the atrocious amount of noise whenever someone does a git blame, git log, git log -S, ...
In other words, checking in your entire dependency source tree in git is unnecessary, wasteful and annoying in the best case scenario.
You should. That does not mean you should host source code and build output together.
> Caching my dependencies in node_modules is perfectly reasonable to me.
Precisely. That's caching. Not source hosting.
> It's not like I'm getting binary diffs. It's Javascript.
Binary node modules aren't uncommon, BTW.
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Of course, you could be using git for more than source hosting, and I think that's precisely what your parent was commenting about.