20,000 fewer lines of code, faster compile / deploy times, significantly less interfacing / translation between "their" types and "their" apis, and a much better control over types and structure across our codebase b/c we didn't need "their" types and structure anywhere. It had crept everywhere.

It's just faster, cleaner, and easier in a few cases to do precisely what you need right now, rather than anticipate a million things you might need and refactor your code to adopt a given "solution".

Yeah, the problem / benefit is never the one framework you added / removed, it is the mindset of reaching for another dependency as a default which leads to a behemoth which no one enjoys working with.

I also think a person who has had to strip out or replace dependencies is more likely to be careful when choosing them in the future. This is definitely the case for me, at least.