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Who's talking about transpiling and mega-frameworks? I'm simply talking about the headache of managing dependencies on a reasonably complex project. The "mega-frameworks", by which I assume you mean products such as Angular, React, Vue, etc., are often not the worst offenders when it comes to external dependencies. Of course, when you start pulling in extensions that story can change, but that can be true of pulling in any other library that provides equivalent functionality (where such exists).