It's hard (not impossible) to avoid this with some user interface code, due to the amount of connected, stateful cruft (hopefully the state is pushed out to the edges, but it has to be there somewhere).

I do appreciate little utility libraries like Ramdajs and Validatejs, though.

This article was a nice reminder to make the attempt to decouple small plugins, though. I like the idea of the base module + alternate framework adapters.