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Yeah, it is completely missing me how web application dependency libraries relate in any way to an IDE for building applications. I don't get this argument and it doesn't seem to me like it makes sense. Perhaps I'm wrong and there's a connection I'm not seeing. Can anyone clarify this?

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The point is that build tools take up disk space, and need to be installed. IDEs like XCode and Visual Studio bring along large quantities of libraries, headers, and other aspects of a C++ / C# / Swift / $LANG build toolchain.

Front-end web dev now consists in large part of building highly interactive applications, not just static sites. That requires tooling. Therefore, it's not unreasonable to expect that the necessary tools will take up space, and there's plenty of prior precedent from other languages.

The lion's share of my node_modules are related to my development environment -- Webpack, Typescript, Babel, SASS, Jest, etc. A very small portion actually gets bundled into the dist.

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