Yes, that is strange. But it will depend how you have got your dev environment setup and how/where the node has been installed in it.
If the nodes are under ~/.node-red/nodes then node-red will be loading them as 'local' nodes by scanning that directory for any .js and .html file pairs.
When installed properly under ~/.node-red/node_modules/... then Node-RED relies on the package.json to tell it what files it needs to load.
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