There is a familiar little discomfort that shows up the first time a Node.js service needs to read something off disk that is not source code. An email template. A JSON schema.
A seed fixture. A vendored PDF. The first version is always a one-liner: fs.readFile(path.join(__dirname, '../templates/welcome.ejs')).
That works on your laptop. It also works in CI. And then you ship to production, your b