Author here.

Thanks for the feedback. The reason I wrote this article is because we _can_ do something about it. Through avoiding throwing lots of wasteful error objects and adding a little bit of caching, the time it took to lint the project became 30% faster. Those changes were applied locally to a couple of popular third party tools for module resolution in node_modules. That's how the 30% speedup was achieved.

That said if module resolution wasn't as complex in node to begin with, the speedup would surely be a little greater. I'm hoping that this post sparks a bit of discussion on that and some node contributors already voiced interest on twitter to think more about that.