I was using storybook and found it had grown so large that its node process would run out of memory before it could start. The downside was that the storybook command did not accept node arguments, like --max_old_space_size=4096
Starting with node 8, node will look for options in an environment variable named NODE_OPTIONS to be interpreted as if they had been specified on the command line before the actual command line (so they can be overridden).
Example to give storybook more memory:
NODE_OPTIONS=--max_old_space_size=4096 storybook start
*References:
https://storybook.js.org
https://nodejs.org/dist/latest-v8.x/docs/api/cli.html#cli_node_options_options