That's not quite true, PnP has always been the default and we have no plans to change that. The only thing that changed is that when you migrate from v1, we automatically enable the node-modules linker.

The reason for that is that PnP tends to require recent versions of some of your dependencies, so migrating to it can be somewhat involved, and it's better experience to let you keep using the install strategy you're used to until you decide to change it yourself.

New projects, on the other hand, already use the latest versions from their dependencies, so it's a much better starting point for PnP.

Sorry for the long delay on replying to this - what packages depend on files being there? I've never had a single issue with pnpm's approach to package management, minus some poor support from github.

I have no idea, but that's the rationale in the Yarn docs.

Probably any package that ships assets (static files) and uses file I/O to read instead of require()