[smitty1e]

Inviting the question of why the culture hasn't sprouted a "package rationalizer" to produce a curated, tested, noise-filtered distribution of useful functionality.

Come to think of it, something that does for packages what jQuery did to bring (some) sanity to browser incompatibilities.

[ng12]

Because we can't even agree on whether React or Vue or Angular is best.

In fact this is the root of the issue. It's important to realize that `node_modules` for any project in Popular Framework X will be almost identical. Most of the packages are related to compiling, bundling, and the development environment and a small minority are actual client-side dependencies. Even the frameworks themselves are pretty light -- React has a grand total of 2 dependencies. It's packaging the entire toolchain that causes most of the bloat.