You're right; I over-stated the benefits of tree-shaking. My comment came out of long frustration that so many of the languages and platforms we use don't even support tree-shaking, so if we care about binary size, we have to do micro-management of dependencies that the machine should be able to do for us. But you're right; the other issues with dependencies remain.
About your 10 MB Unicode table example, did you have in mind the ICU data table that's included with Chromium and, more recently, all the Electron-based apps?
