[captn3m0]

I think a better measure really is lines of code. A comparison with react is _very unfair to laravel/rails_, with laravel being a full-featured framework, and yet react is still much worse:

laravel/framework:

  no-dev-deps: 307,405 lines of PHP (36MB)

  all-deps: 535,383 lines of PHP (58MB)

react (stock create-react-app)[1]

  all-deps: 1,570,720 lines of Javascript + 96417 lines of typescript (348MB)

rails (rails new app):

  (no-dev-deps): 264123 lines of Ruby + 23614 lines of C + 17009 lines of JS (55MB)

  (all-deps): 332083 lines of Ruby + 23614 lines of C + 18055 lines of JS (54MB)

Here's the raw results: https://www.toptal.com/developers/hastebin/osujizeraw.txt

[1]: create-react-app doesn't split out dev/prod dependencies https://stackoverflow.com/a/44872787/368328