Deleting files programmatically is crucial for cleanup operations, temporary file management, and storage optimization in Node.js applications. As the creator of CoreUI, a widely used open-source UI library, I’ve implemented file deletion in countless backend services over 25 years of development. From my expertise, the most reliable approach is using the fs.unlink() method, which removes files from the filesystem safely. This is essential for managing uploads, cache files, and temporary data storage.