Sure, but the major difference is that those packages are for everything on your system. Dependencies are often added very carefully. In the node case it is no

Sure, but the major difference is that those packages are for everything on your system. Dependencies are often added very carefully. In the node case it is not uncommon for a small app to include 50 small packages, and then those packages pulled in 30 unique smaller packages each (on average). Imagine you did an apt upgrade on your system, or decided to install a new package and it said it was going to install 1500 new packages. Would you continue? It would definitely make me pause for a while. But this is the norm in the node world, and people seem to think it is a good idea.