I've recently been taking my time evaluating dependencies for a few small node projects, and I've actually found I've been impressed at how few dependencies are used by a subset of the Javascript package ecosystem.
I find, anecdotally, that rather than the broad spectrum you might expect, packages tend to either have a huge number of dependencies, or very few. Meaning if you do want to slim down your project's dependencies, it's usually simply a matter of identifying the whales and substituting/eliminating them with something saner.
Take for example two of the most popular package bundlers:
- parcel: direct dependencies: 59, total dependencies: 1575
- rollup: direct dependencies: 3, total dependencies: 9
