It was definitely Zed. I forget what it was that used node.js, and I was able to disable that with some effort. But it annoyed me because I shouldn't have to, you know? In my opinion the default out of the box install should be sleek and not use many resources, and only add more stuff if I ask for it.
We use node.js to run a number of language servers and formatters (which are often written in node due to the VSCode ancestry...).
There've been a lot of requests to disable language servers by default; but I think that's not the right default for most users – things should work out of the box.
That said, better control over this is definitely something we will add.
You're right, I just checked the Arch package and it has a non-optional dependency on the nodejs package[1], which means you're forced to install it even if you don't use it. That sucks. :(
