I accidentally added an node project with node modules into IntelliJ and its still indexing my files.. hopefully it'll get over till my next years appraisal

Sounds like you should cut back on your dependencies or give your work station some love — I do that on a daily/weekly basis (from scratch, incrementally, by updating, or manual re-indexing) and have never seen it index for long enough to really care...

@Flygger thanks for the suggestion

Grooming your dependencies is a good thing to do on a regular basis to make sure you don't carry around things that you don't need, either because you don't use them anymore or because you never really did...
Keeping an eye on the versions and their changes can also help you keep down the weight of your `node_modules` and you might find lighter alternatives to some of the biggest offenders, either in terms of the dependency being lighter or itself having fewer/more focused dependencies...