The language and capabilities of the platform indeed have a lot of influence on how many packages the average project depends on.

With Swift on iOS/macOS for instance it’s not strange at all for an app to have a dependency tree consisting of only 5-10 third party packages total, and with a little discipline one can often get that number down to <5. Why? Because between the language itself, UIKit/AppKit, and SwiftUI, nearly all needs are pretty well covered.

I think it’s time to beef up both JavaScript itself as well as the platforms where it’s run (such as the browser and Node), so people don’t feel nearly as much of a need to pull in tons of dependencies.

You can do that with node.js too. It’s the libraries themselves that tries to bring in the whole world. It’s a matter of culture.