been doing something similar. the projects ive been building recently use as few dependencies as possible and honestly the maintenance burden dropped significantly. when something breaks you actually know where to look instead of digging through 15 layers of node_modules. people said the same thing to me about it not scaling but the opposite turned out to be true.

yeah, plus stack traces, debuggers, and profiling tools are easier to use when all of the non-essential complexity is stripped out. which in turn means it's possible to work productively on software that solves more complex problems.

that's in contrast with the sort of stuff that invariably shows up when something falls over somewhere in a dependency:

    cannot access property "apply" of null
    at forEach()
    at setTimeout()
    at digest()
    at callback()
    at then()
    ...