I was looking at this issue since I've been using remote compute for development, and with the workspace stored in azure blob storage making storing node_modules in the workspace inefficient and slow, and sometimes bricks my remote compute. Instead, I need to have node_modules stored locally on the azure remote compute instance - but since it's outside of my workspace I can't sync the package.json with changes that are live in the repository. I found:

symlink home/azureuser/.../package.json pointing to frontend/package.json

then symlink frontend/node_modules pointing to home/azureuser/.../node_modules

Basically, symlinking in opposite directions, one (package.json) reading from the workspace which is live and synced with the repo, and the other (node_modules) then reading from the remote compute

Another solution would be to have the entire workspace on the compute, but it's not company practice