[pluma]

The alternative isn't having a single more complete package, it's having a few dozens of more complete, overlapping packages that each don't fully satisfy your needs.

The overhead is negligible: running `npm install` in production is considered an anti-pattern and because of how npm's dependency resolution works each dependency can have different copies of the same (second order) dependency. The likelihood that there will be version conflicts (and thus duplication) is far smaller when there are smaller more specialised packages instead of a few big ones.

It's not about package size. Nobody cares about package size (except for frontend code but it's fairly easy to pare those deps down to the bare minimum).

Also, nearly all of jQuery's deps are development deps not needed in production. Those deps are only interesting for maintainers -- building jQuery yourself is likely the wrong thing to do. It's only necessary because jQuery doesn't yet expose its "submodules" properly.