What did you switch to instead? I used to be a C# dev, and have done my fair share of Go. Both of those have decent enough standard libraries that I never found myself with a large 3rd party dependency tree.

Ruby, Python, and Clojure, though? They weren’t any better than my npm projects, being roughly the same order of magnitude. Same seems to be true for Rust.

You can get pretty far in python without a lot of dependencies, and the dependencies you do need tend to be more substantial blocks of functionality. Much easier to keep the tree small than npm.

Same with Java, if you avoid springboot and similar everything frameworks, which admittedly is a bit of an uphill battle given the state of java developers.

You can of course also keep dependencies small in javascript, but it's a very uphill fight where you'll have just a few options and most people you hire are used to including a library (that includes 10 libraries) to not have to so something like `if (x % 2 == 1)`

Just started with golang... the language is a bit annoying but the dependency culture seems OK