[schneidmaster]

I think there are two primary reasons why JavaScript projects tend to have much larger dependency trees than in ruby or other ecosystems.

1. The JavaScript standard library is much more sparse than what you get out-of-the-box with ruby or many other languages. The existence of lodash is evidence of this in itself. The infamous left-pad fiasco would never have happened if JavaScript's native String had an equivalent to ruby's String#rjust. This part of the problem is significantly improving with time -- for example, node.js 8.0 and up do have a native string pad function, padStart. However, especially for tooling libraries, using the latest native JS features means dropping support for semi-recent versions of node, and there's also generally a lot of inertia.

2. npm and yarn allow you to install multiple versions of the same package. If I have dependencies A and B, which both require different major versions of dependency C, npm and yarn will both happily install multiple copies of C. With ruby/bundler this is an error and you have to work out how to tweak your dependencies so they're all happy with the same version range. I suspect this architectural choice is largely a consequence of #1 -- especially in the earlier days of npm, getting all your dependencies on the same version of a commonly used helper library would have been nightmarish. And there are benefits to this approach; I have certainly spent long hours trying to upgrade ruby gems with version conflicts. But it results in a lot more bloat almost by default.

To answer your original question -- I don't know that anything in particular is intentionally being done. I do think we're heading in the right direction and things will be much better in a few years as packages slowly move towards new native language features rather than helper libraries. I also just don't think this is of critical importance at the end of the day. If you add up the brain cycles that I've ever spent worrying about 100MB of hard drive space, it's almost certainly less than what I've spent typing this comment :)