If you look at something like Bazel, all the build artifacts end up in ~/.cache (or similar). Thus there are no artifacts to gitignore. OCI container builds ("docker images") are done by simply adding artifacts controlled by a build rule into the image (rather than starting a vm/container, copying a working directory into the container, and running random shell commands).

To summarize, I think the problem is that node puts packages in your working directory instead of some other location, causing you to have to ignore them. It is reasonable to check in your dependencies, in which case node's strategy is fine. But you can compare this to something like go, which puts all modules in $GOPATH/pkg/mod and if you want to check in your modules, you run "go mod vendor" and it creates a vendor/ directory in your working directory to check in. All of these ignore files exist to work around other packages; it's not git or docker or dropbox's fault that some tool you use contaminates your working directory. Plenty of designs exist for those types of tools that don't.