[mwcampbell]

Perhaps I wasn't clear. What I meant is that in environments that do support tree-shaking, you can depend on large libraries, and/or many small libraries, and the run-time impact will be no more than if you had written or copied and pasted just the functionality you need.

[_0w8t]

This could be very true, but to show the causality it is necessary that tree shaking abilities of language/tools on average precedes widespread use of huge dependency trees. It could be in reverse. That is when for some unknown reasons multiple dependencies appears, tree-shaking tools follow and it is just easier to create them for static languages.