alt Hacker NewsThe lesson surely though is 'don't use web-tech, aimed at solving browser incompatibility issues for local scripting'.
When you're running NPM tooling you're running libraries primarily built for those problems, hence the torrent of otherwise unnecessary complexity of polyfills, that happen to be running on a JS engine that doesn't get a browser attached to it.
Very few packages published on npm include polyfills, especially packages you'd use when doing local scripting.