The culture of the Node.js ecosystem is to split things into many small packages, so there is no alternative dependencies with a fewer number of dependencies themselves. (This is drastically different than some ecosystems like Go, where dependencies are practically discouraged.) We try to avoid using obscure packages anyway, so even if there was, we'd be choosing between the popular and well tested package to one that was less popular and tested but had less dependencies. This is probably not a tradeoff we'd be willing to make without a lot of trust in the less popular package.

I have never seen NodeJS (or any other) developers advocating to blindly include third-party code in their applications. I think what you are describing is just a side-effect of not considering the ramifications which only works until NPM (or any package manager) starts being exploited.

At least in my experience it's surprisingly difficult to find alternative packages that don't rely on all sorts of (often gratuitous) other dependencies.