> Not to mention the constant battle with windows defender, which slows npm installs and webpack compiles to an absolute crawl due to the large number of filesystem requests, won't respect a whitelist, and re-enables itself every 4-24 hours depending on the phase of the moon

I'm not a huge fan of Defender (although it is less like malware than most anti-viruses I've been forced to use), but npm and webpack are not blameless here. It's completely flipping absurd how many tens of thousands of files a medium size front-end project that uses these technologies spawns and kills every time it is rebuilt. I'm tempted to RAM-disk those folders, because even with fast SSDs, IO speed becomes a gating factor in my workflow.