I call this kind of attitude the "Tea Party" of JavaScript development. The reason why we currently have JavaScript tooling fatigue is exactly because Tea Party developers insist on writing everything themselves instead of trying to build a better abstraction. The lesson here isn't not fewer dependencies: it's managing dependencies. NPM should not allow someone to arbitrarily remove modules that other's may be depending on. It's like building a bridge and them deciding to remove it after a whole city now depends on it.

It's more like planting a bush in your front yard, and for some reason the metropolitan train system decides to use your bush's shadow to tell the time of day, and builds that into every aspect of the entire city's transportation network. Then you cut the bush down and everyone starves.