As far as I know, these 100+ dev dependencies are installed by default.
Yes, you can probably avoid it, but it will likely break something during the build process, and most people just stick to the default anyway.
> Reproducible builds, or don’t use those packages.
No. They’re only installed if you git clone react and npm install inside your clone.
They are only installed for the topmost package (the one you are working on), npm does not recurse through all your dependencies and install their devDependencies.
Indeed.
My apologies for misinterpreting the link that I posted.
Consider "devDependencies" here
https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/main/package.json
As far as I know, these 100+ dev dependencies are installed by default. Yes, you can probably avoid it, but it will likely break something during the build process, and most people just stick to the default anyway.
> Reproducible builds, or don’t use those packages.
A lot of things are not reproducible/hermetic builds. Even GitHub Actions is not reproducible https://nesbitt.io/2025/12/06/github-actions-package-manager...
Most frontend frameworks are not reproducible either.
> don’t use those packages.
And do what?