[geezerjay]

> Citation needed?

I don't have a citation, but a colleague of mine who's working on front-end projects repeatedly complains that today's JS stacks require half a dozen base JS packages, which in turn download dozens if not hundreds of ancillary packages, not to mention requiring a couple of transpilers and a bunch of tooling.

And for what? Well, just to be able to render some text and a couple of buttons.

Nowadays we have whole server projects that take less than 50MB of source code and dependencies to build, while a miserable SPA with a login screen and a couple of menus and buttons requires nearly 400MB of JS.

That's pretty bleak.

[tlrobinson]

Serious question: why do you care about 400MB vs 50MB of dev dependencies? Is your internet connection slow? Are you running out of hard drive space?

There are projects like create-react-app and Parcel which offer very reasonable zero-configuration toolchains.

If you care a lot about runtime dependency weight, there are lightweight libraries like Preact (3kB).