Doesn't this apply to every language? You always will rely on external libraries once a project reaches a certain level.

Python has nothing on the sprawl of nodejs packages.

It is a fair criticism and some languages do fare better than others. Python is kind of in the middle there in my opinion. It's pretty easy to keep a relatively simple dependency graph with a little bit of discipline.

Certainly not those where you need to reimplement everything yourself, at least ;)