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by classified 2198 days ago
OMG, that list of frontend dependencies is just soul-crushing. How does anyone stay sane using NodeJS?
2 comments

Actually, wasn’t bad when I looked at it. I’ve seen much much x5 worse.

A few font-awesome, testing-library, ES-Lint & react imports. Some of those broader libraries have been broken up so you don’t have to import the whole enchilada.

But ya in a larger project, mixing and matching the versions of some of those components can get tricky. This repo seems reasonable in dependencies, the dependencies of dependencies on the other hand can be crazy in any project these days.

yarn.lock is just under half a megabyte, and lists 1461 packages that it installs. (232 of them are second or subsequent versions of the same package, which typically indicates unmaintained software. It has five versions of kind-of, and four versions of ten other packages.)
Ya, that's not great - don't think the parent project of this post has gone off the rails though. More of an ecosystem problem.
I think you should refer to package.json for actual dependencies. But yes, I agree that tool dependencies are dependent on a lot of dependencies. I'll evaluate and reduce tool dependencies, if possible.

That being said, the gzipped js bundle size is fairly small (under 200kb).

NodeJS == backend
I'm afraid you'll need to revisit this "fact".

The project in question, for instance, only uses NodeJS to build its frontend. The backend is written in python.

People who want to use react for their frontend _have_ to use NodeJS, for instance.