[austincheney]

The standard technologies are larger than they used to be, but this isn't the problem that frustrates people.

The JavaScript ecosystem is big because crappy developers are addicted to stupid. Impose hard lines in your office to ban unnecessary abstractions, large frameworks, offload extraneous build steps, and trim off as much as you can. Do this and don't allow stupid back in.

Is that going to scare the crap out of insecure developers. Absolutely. They can get over it (and you can train them) or they can go somewhere else. If you want small manageable code this is the hard choice you have to make.

If you are not willing to make hard decisions (and tell the cry babies to STFU) then don't complain about big code. This trauma is completely self-induced.