When you create a project it makes like 100 files that are all automatically executed somehow. Nothing really includes them, but you know it works. These files arp part of your project, but they is also a bunch of rails stuff so it blurs what is and isn't a dependency for your project.

With node projects they typically keep all of their dependency neatly under node_modules/ and you can clearly see how things are included and how things work.

I hear your point but the quantity of files produced by initializing a new rails project is very large, larger than an equivalent node project with server and framework. These aren't transient build artifacts either, they will live in the repo and may occasionally need attention.