You can totally do all of this. There are projects that just pipe the output of Babel into uglifyjs into a file and call it a day. You still “need” to use npm t

You can totally do all of this. There are projects that just pipe the output of Babel into uglifyjs into a file and call it a day. You still “need” to use npm to install those packages though. npm puts command line utilities in node_modules/.bin to not pollute your machine. npm just stores packages as tar.gz files though, so if you wanted to you could wget them yourself.