It’s not just NPM, though. Every Rails project and every Rust project I’ve seen ended up with massive numbers of dependencies vs what an equivalent project in Go or C# would have needed.

CPAN too, just try Hailo under Perl to test an old-fashioned chatbot based on Markov chains where very small LLM's and Hailo converge if used with the advanced training options for it. Yes, it will pull tons of dependencies, (less with cpanminus if run with 'cpanm -n Hailo'), but contrary to NPM, Pip and the like CPAN's repos are highly curated and before PHP and ubiquitoous Python Perl was used everywhere, from a sysadmin language (better than Bash/Sh for sure) to CGI, IRC bots and whatnot. How many issues did we have? Zero or near zero.