It would be interesting to see some data. Node definitely has that reputation, but every other language I’ve worked in—ruby, python, golang, clojure, hell even objective c—all have rich library ecosystems and most libraries include other libraries. They also all have plenty of small, single-purpose libraries. Perhaps node is a bit worse, but it’s not like it’s in a different category. Most popular languages/ecosystems are like this.

Node/JS definitely is a lot worse and in a different category by several orders of magnitude.

My theory is that this is because there is no standard library in Node.

My JS frontend has something like 20,000 packages that need to be installed to build the app. The next highest-dependency lang I use is python, where my average python app will have approx 100 packages all in. And then it only goes down from there with other systems.

I suppose a lot of that can be chalked up to the overall size of the ecosystem (and also the complexity of frontends).

There's an exponential effect at work based on the number of libraries that do any one thing. If in python you have (for sake of argument) an average of 5, and in node an average of 25, the downstream effect is that you have massively more dependencies in your tree (many, many, more than 5x), just like you're seeing.

I still don't think the O(n) properties of dependency trees are any different in other languages though. Node just has the largest scale. If python had as many total packages as node, and was also as popular for building frontends, I think you'd have exactly the same situation. That's what I meant by "not in a different category". Node's scale/popularity is in a different category than python's, but its approach to dependencies is basically the same.