As we do many experiments with UI based frameworks node_modules folders occupy a large portion of the disk space and after a few years, the disk space starts to diminish.
I have a 500GB SSD hard disk in my laptop and have recently run out of space and started to analyze what is that occupies so much space. I do not store personal images and documents on my laptop, at least not more than 1-2 GB.
When I analyzed the code base folder I realized that the experiments I did years ago are still on my machine and needed some cleanup. The easiest way was to remove unused data without any kind of loss is by deleting the huge node_modules folder in every project I did not use currently.
For this purpose, I wrote below PowerShell script to clean up all the node_modules folders in my code folder
Get-ChildItem -Path . -Filter node_modules -Recurse | Remove-Item -Force -Recurse
The "Get-Childitem" here gets all the folders with path "." (which is the current folder I am running the script in) with filter as folder name "node_module" and pipes in into "Remove-Item" command. This command recursively finds all the files and folders inside and deletes them without confirmation. ("Force" parameter is added to avoid asking yes/no before deleting each folder)
After executing this command I was able to recover more than 20Gb of disk space.