> Unless it's actually not that simple?

Recognising that given sufficient domain knowledge you could minimise and optimise dependencies and actually having that domain knowledge for this specific field are not the same thing. For the former, you just need to be a professional. For the latter, you need to be in luck for this specific subject.

You don't fix that by being snarky. Ironic, because in the last paragraph you do ask for constructive criticism! The least you could do is materially reciprocate in doing so.

I don't know anything about this project, but it's okay to criticize large dependency trees and complexity. It sounds like you're looking for suggestions on how to fix that or the other. Neither of those things is trivially fixable, they're pretty fundamental problems. Sometimes a rewrite can do it.