[skydhash]

Stuff like Babel, React, Svelte, Axios, Redux, Jest… should be self contained and not depend on anything other than being a peer dependency. They are core technological choices that happens early in the project and is hard or impossible to replace afterwards.

[WorldMaker]

- I feel that you are unlikely to need Babel in 2025, most things it historically transpiled are Baseline Widely Available now (and most of the things it polyfilled weren't actually Babel's but brought in from other dependencies like core-js, which you probably don't need either in 2025). For the rest of the things it still transpiles (pretty much just JSX) there are cheaper/faster transpilers with fewer external dependencies and runtime dependencies (Typescript, esbuild). It should not be hard to replace Babel in your stack: if you've got a complex webpack solution (say from CRA reasons) consider esbuild or similar.

- Axios and Jest have "native" options now (fetch and node --test). fetch is especially nice because it is the same API in the browser and in Node (and Deno and Bun).

- Redux is self-contained.

- React itself is sort of self-contained, it's the massive ecosystem that makes React the most appealing that starts to drive dependency bloat. I can't speak to Svelte.

[johnny22]

Last i checked react's new compiler still depends on babel! :(

[WorldMaker]

Yeah, I still don't understand a lot of the architecture choices behind the new compiler, including why the new compiler isn't mostly just a set of eslint suggestions with auto-fixes. I've seen the blog posts trying to explain it, but they don't seem to answer my questions. But then I also haven't done enough direct React work recently enough to have need of or actually tried to use the new compiler, so maybe I am just asking the wrong questions.

[user34283]

Jest alone adds 300 packages by the way.

[WorldMaker]

Yep, which is part of why it feels real good to delete Jest and switch to `node --test`. I realize for a lot of projects that is easier said than done because Jest isn't just the test harness but the assertions framework (`node:assert/strict` isn't terrible; Chai is still a good low-dependency option for fancier styles of assertions) and mocks/substitutes framework (I'm sure there are options there; I never liked Jest's style of mocks so I don't have a recommendation handy).

(ETA: Also, you may not need much for a mocks library because JS' Proxy meta-object isn't that hard to work with directly.)