> It's weird their promotional video repeats "you can do <million things> without installing dependencies",

A couple years ago a common complaint was that the JavaScript ecosystem relied too heavily on dependencies for everything. Remember the left-pad incident where the developer deleted the popular dependency out of protest for reasons I can even remember? Or when colors.js was sabotaged to break everything that depended on it? The node-ipc package was sabotaged to delete files on developer’s machines. Then we had a wave of supply chain attacks that tried to insert malware into build scripts of popular dependencies.

So the ecosystem started moving toward more batteries-included style development in response.

The complaint was micro-dependencies and huge sprawling trees. What was needed was quality dependencies on the level of SDL, ffmpeg, libcurl, where one domain is solved well and the focus is on API stability and good implementation. Not a battery included type of things.