Agreed, it's an ecosystem-wide challenge. But React's dominance effectively cemented the 'build step as default' paradigm. When an entire generation of developers learns to `npm install` before understanding the DOM, the penalty for third-party drift gets baked into the architecture early. Delivering raw ES modules over a CDN structurally forces a lighter dependency footprint and pushes complexity to the edges.

Yeah, I agree.

Build systems (especially Babel and Webpack) were the first big culprits in terms of dependency bloat, and it was very rare to see React without them.