That’s hardly true. Some standard libs are smaller, but in most other languages I can think of there isn’t the complete dependency hell. I want to install one package, the 50 dependencies or their ancestors create an audit he’ll (is the package secure, so I trust the developer to not inject malware, abandon the package, or add more dependencies), etc.
My point was that if you're comparing JS dependencies to other languages, you need to include their compilers too, since e.g. TypeScript projects depend on `tsc`. If you include the size of C/C++/Rust/Java/etc. compilers, I'm sure you'll find 50mb+ of dependencies. You're right that it's self-contained though (to be fair, so is `tsc` – most projects could shed a lot of dependencies by abandoning Babel in favor of `tsc` or esbuild).
