I have built a project generator for my company. It's a globally installed npm package, that when run, takes the entire contents of a /template directory inside the package and copies it to the user's chosen destination.
Inside /template I have 2 files that npm pack refuses to include in the final published module:
/template/.gitignore
/template/.npmrc
Everything else, including other hidden files, get packed as expected.
These 2 files are not in any root (or nested) .gitignore files, and I'm not manually specifying any files array in any package.json that npm might pick up on.
This is intentional behaviour https://docs.npmjs.com/misc/developers#keeping-files-out-of-your-package
The workaround was to create .gitignore.template and rename on install