But, this is exactly what I'm saying. you start with a small, focused library that contains everything you need, which is usually fairly minimal, so that library is small. but then, along the way, you find yourself wanting, so you add a library that adds support for that specific thing.

I didn't add sinon-as-promised for fun, I added it for in-memory sequelize integration tests. same for all the other libraries I mentioned.

My point is that by keeping libraries small, you will end up with either more dependencies, or a lot more hand-rolled code. Neither of these things are inherently bad or good, and I'm not defending them. What I am trying to do is explain to the commenter why the node ecosystem seems to have such an emphasis on package management and the tooling around that.

From the readme I can't really see how to write extensive unit tests with that thing.. If I need to test something I want only one tool that works perfectly and does all the Stubbing, Mocking, verification, data driven test and behaviour driven test. I still haven't found in any language/ecosystem anything comparable to Spock in completeness, readability and ease of use. Honestly I can't really see how to do BDD with tape.

its not that hard. That being said, the current all in one turnkey testing framework for javascript is Jest, and that will pretty much do it all in one tool.