pier

That's basically why it's impossible to do with Alfred, too.
 
Alfred uses the same metadata index and API as Spotlight, so suffers from many of the same limitations, including the "whitelist-only" approach, which is inherent to the API.
 
So for technical reasons, adding a blacklisting layer to Alfred would have a very significant impact on performance.
 
A blacklist has been requested many times, but the Alfred team has expressed reluctance for the above reason.
 
It sucks especially for folks with Node projects, as node_modules is basically Alfred's kryptonite. A Node project is effectively a worst-case scenario for the Spotlight/Alfred model.
 

Thanks all for your support and the nice conversation.

You are of course technically correct, but I feel since Node and NPM entered the scene we are in a new JS renaissance that it's still trying to trying to define itself. I don't mean the language itself but the whole development process. Maybe I'm delusional, but I think (I hope) we should reach a maturity plateau in a couple of years.

If your app doesn't use Node you use this https://github.com/francoislaberge/shrinkray (macOS only)
 
 
JS is in a teenager phase like PHP was 15-20 years ago. Hopefully it will mature and learn from its mistakes if Web Assembly doesn't kill it...