[RussianCow]

> The reason packages are so big is the complexity for an interesting app is irreducible.

This is absolutely, demonstrably false. Can you really claim that you use 100% of the features provided by all of the dependencies you pull in? If not, you are introducing unnecessary complexity to your code.

That doesn't mean that this is necessarily a bad thing, or that we should never ever introduce incidental complexity—we'd never get anything done if that was the case. My point is simply that there exists a spectrum that goes from "write everything from scratch" on one end all the way to "always use third-party code wherever possible" on the other. It's up to you to make the tradeoff of which libraries are worth pulling in for a given project, but when you use third-party code, you inevitably introduce some amount of complexity that has nothing to do with your app and doesn't need to be there.

[shadowgovt]

I don't use 100% of the features I pull in. But I also don't use 100% of the features of libc or gtk if I'm building a GUI app in C.

I have 35 MB of node_modules, but after webpack walks the module hierarchy and tree-shakes out all module exports that aren't reachable, I'm left with a couple hundred kilobytes of code in the final product.

[RussianCow]

> But I also don't use 100% of the features of libc or gtk if I'm building a GUI app in C.

That’s exactly my point. This is a tradeoff that’s inherent to software development and has nothing to do with the web or Node or NPM. You could just as well decide to write your desktop app with a much smaller GUI library, or even write your own minimal one, if the tradeoff is worth it to reduce complexity. (Example: you’re writing an app for an embedded device with very limited resources that won’t be able to handle GTK.)