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Many authors are strangely against it for some reason. One time I sorted my node_modules by size and opened issues for the top offenders, you can see their resistance here:

https://github.com/crypto-browserify/sha.js/issues/5

https://github.com/medikoo/es5-ext/issues/11

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Speaking as very-much-not-a-JS-developer: Isn't this essentially the same problem Linux package managers solve with -dev, -doc, and -dbg packages? I.e. the default install only contains the minimum necessary to use a program, and if you need the header files/documentation/debug symbols, you can just install them separately.

Is it too hard to meaningfully separate these parts of a package, or is it more of a philosophical issue?

It really is not too hard to separate these things in npm, but very few packages do.

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