Your node_modules directory can get so bloated that the community came up with different package managers just for deduplication! pnpm, for example, makes one global-adjacent cache, and then just symlinks the dependencies as needed. This is because the regular npm doesn’t, because what if the package changed between the 20ms since I downloaded it for nuxt? (Sorry Nuxt users, had to pick a name)

They’re asking “technically or actually in practice?”.

The subtle difference is that your $SHELL is responsible for opening (and, iirc, parsing?) the file when you use \<, versus the $EDITOR being the responsible entity.