When I was learning JS/node/npm as a total programming newbie, a lot of the advice online was basically “if you write your own version of foobar when foobar is already available as an npm package, you’re stupid for wasting your time”.

I’d never worked in any other ecosystem, and I wish I realized that advice was specific to JS culture

It's not really bad advice, it just has different implications in Javascript.

In other languages, you'd have a few dependencies on larger libraries providing related functionality, where the Javascript culture is to use a bunch of tiny libraries to give the same functionality.

Sometimes I wonder how many of these tiny libraries are just the result of an attempt to have something ready for a conference talk and no one had the courage to say "Uh, Chris, that already exists, and the world doesn't need your different approach on it."

It's a waste of time to strictly vet dependencies on my side when adding the standard test runner by Meta - jest - alone adds 300 packages to my dependency graph.

So yes, the sprawling deps tree and culture is the problem. We would need to start reducing dependencies of the basic tools first. Otherwise it seems rather pointless to bother app developers with reducing dependencies.