I'm not sure I follow the semantics of this change.  AFAIK the rules in https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/ee3b4fd5b27d71345e9e3dcb5b1de2b6d1f91fbf/.gitignore#L5-L6  are there to un-ignore `.*` files.    There might simply be a bug in the rule at https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/ee3b4fd5b27d71345e9e3dcb5b1de2b6d1f91fbf/.gitignore#L79  sing IIUC it should be just `/node_modules` (I think the `./` makes it global)