[johannessjoberg]

It's also a matter of choice when consuming libraries like expressjs, which the linked article referes to.

For example, hapi (https://hapi.dev/), a feature comparable web server framework to express, has zero external dependecies.

There are a lot of responsible maintainers of great packages in the node community which keep dependencies to a minimum. It's up to the consumers to use and value them, not just default to the likes of express.