Comment by Etheryte
I think where our opinions differ is what boundaries this logic should cross. When I'm in Bash-land, I'm happy that my Bash-isms use the rest of what's available in the Bash env. When I'm in Node, likewise, as this is an expected and desirable outcome. Where this doesn't sit right with me is when a Node-land script crosses this boundary and starts murking around with things from a different domain.
In general, I would want everything to work by the principle of least surprise, so Node stuff interacts with Node dependencies, Python does Python things, Bash does Bash env, etc. If I need one to interact with the other, I want to be explicit about it, not have some spooky action at a distance.
Completely understandable, it's just... it's just not in the cards. A large part of UNIX ecosystem has not, historically, been kind to this view. Remember autotools/autoconf, makefiles with DESTDIR, and all that similar jazz? People genuinely proposed that stuff as the solution for the management of ambient dependencies. And it takes just one slip up of "shelling out" (hopefully it's actually "forking off", not literally shelling out) for all kinds of funny business re-appearing again — and don't even start on the /lib and .so management.