[no_wizard]

I wonder if there would be any interest from folks for an alternative npm registry that would automatically cleanup dependency chains like this (among other things, possibly), remove polyfills etc.

I always thought about something like this, with on the fly manipulation of packages via SWC would be pretty fast I think

[nicoburns]

I think a better approach would be automated tooling to detect opportunities for cleanup, and then submitting PRs to libraries.

[rschristian]

That only works if the maintainers of the packages are interested in the cleanup -- the maintainer behind some of the packages mentioned in this thread is very much not. They prefer the bloat to incrementing the major version number.

[bsimpson]

esm.sh kind of does this for livecoding environments (e.g. Codepen/Colab) where you're using <script type=importmap> instead of a bundler.