This is a valid question coming from an outsider looking in.
There are various packages that are extremely small (see leftpad and associated controversy). They often wind up in a slightly larger package, which itself winds up in a slightly larger package, which recurs until you finally wind up with one actual package of consequence that you're targeting. For example, Express (a very common Node.js abstraction) has 26 direct dependencies, yet 41 total dependencies.
A lot of this results from early Node.js' mantra of having small, focused packages. This could potentially be a good thing because instead of having three major dependencies that have their own way of leftpadding they can all rely on one library and thus code is efficiently reused. This can be bad, however, when they each need their own version of the dependency - or worse - the dependency is removed from the registry (see Leftpad and associated controversy).
One of the legitimate problems that I've seen is that there are various libraries that are just thin wrappers over functionality that is native to Node.js - but written to be "easier to grok". Thus, these thin abstractions become practical code duplication out of some mixture of Node's developers lack of effective verbosity/documentation and application developer laziness. But then they creep higher up the dependency chain because someone at a lower level used it.
On one hand it can be quite simple (and rewarding) to write code while minimizing dependencies. On the other hand, abstractions such as Express make it very easy to write code and it feels like you only have "one dependency" until you look under the hood.
Babel, the most popular transpiler, is 335 total dependencies, and it doesn't even do anything out-of-the-box. You need to add babel-preset-latest for 385 total dependencies if you want to actually transpile anything.
There are various packages that are extremely small (see leftpad and associated controversy). They often wind up in a slightly larger package, which itself winds up in a slightly larger package, which recurs until you finally wind up with one actual package of consequence that you're targeting. For example, Express (a very common Node.js abstraction) has 26 direct dependencies, yet 41 total dependencies.
A lot of this results from early Node.js' mantra of having small, focused packages. This could potentially be a good thing because instead of having three major dependencies that have their own way of leftpadding they can all rely on one library and thus code is efficiently reused. This can be bad, however, when they each need their own version of the dependency - or worse - the dependency is removed from the registry (see Leftpad and associated controversy).
One of the legitimate problems that I've seen is that there are various libraries that are just thin wrappers over functionality that is native to Node.js - but written to be "easier to grok". Thus, these thin abstractions become practical code duplication out of some mixture of Node's developers lack of effective verbosity/documentation and application developer laziness. But then they creep higher up the dependency chain because someone at a lower level used it.
On one hand it can be quite simple (and rewarding) to write code while minimizing dependencies. On the other hand, abstractions such as Express make it very easy to write code and it feels like you only have "one dependency" until you look under the hood.