> Can you elaborate as to why?

Because Rust crates are the "compilation unit" as well as the "publishing unit". So if you are a largish library then you'll likely want to split your library across several crates (to enable things like parallelism in the build process). Then you'll end up with several crates from the same git repo, same developers, that will show up individually in the raw crate count.

It's not a perfect analogy (because crates are generally multiple files), but imagine if in a C project you counted each header file as a separate dependency, it's kinda like that.

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There is a culture in the Rust ecosystem of preferring shared crates for functionality rather than writing custom versions of data structures or putting too much in the standard library (although it's not nearly so extreme as in the JavaScript ecosystem). And I do think the concern around supply-chain attacks is not entirely unwarranted. But at the same time, the quality standards for these crates are excellent, and in practice many of them are maintained by a relatively small group of people that as a Rust developer I know and trust.

And are these dependencies that get pulled and built general-purpose? I presume it is since it is published, but I have no idea if it is indeed general-purpose, or something like "internal/*/*" in Go where the code is not supposed to be used by any other codebase.