Comment by snovymgodym

> I'm really curious where you're getting this impression from?

Experience mainly, though perhaps I live in a bubble. My "99%" assertion was more pointed at the "server-side on Linux" part than the "most likely in a container" part.

Really the point I wanted to make was that your development and test environment should be the same as, or as close as possible to, your production environment.

If your app is going to be deployed on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (whether in a container, VM, or baremetal), then don't bother chasing down cryptic NPM errors that arise when you run it on Ubuntu, Mac, or Windows. Just run everything out of a RHEL docker container which mimics your production environment and spent your limited time doing the actual task at hand. It simply is not worth your time to rabbit hole endlessly on NPM errors that happen on an environment you'll never deploy to.

> There are a lot of reasons to investigate these things, ...

Sure, I don't really disagree with that and generally it's good to have a solid understanding of your tools and what lies in the layers below the abstractions that you normally work with. The detective work in the post is solid.

But the thing is that the author was supposed to be learning NodeJS in order to ramp up on a React project. But he got derailed (heh) by this side quest which delayed him being able to do the actual work he set out to do. Whether or not it was worth the time is subjective. But either way, it would not have happened in the first place with better dev environment practices.