Answer from @ngompa in the matrix chat of the cloud SIG:
yeah, we intentionally do not offer that feature, it’s a bad misfeature
I know there have been many regrets for offering that capability in Zypper
it has resulted in people breaking their system upgrades from time to time because nobody knows what they’re doing when they break things like that
The the proper way forward seems to be to make some dependencies of nodejs or ca-certificates weak dependencies that can be omitted.
Another option could be to build a custom ca-certificates rpm without any dependencies.
@patches @sgallagh , do you know why ca-certificates is not a weak dependency to nodejs?