As a trivial example, I spent a couple of hours last night pruning stuff I didn't need from one of my text editor plugins (https://github.com/mhinz/vim-signify

As a trivial example, I spent a couple of hours last night pruning stuff I didn't need from one of my text editor plugins (https://github.com/mhinz/vim-signify https://github.com/mhinz/vim-signify). I was able to take it down from 1400 lines to sub-300 lines. And in the process it became a lot clearer precisely what the algorithmic core of the library was. A valuable learning experience. vim-signify was 800 lines large back in 2014 when I first started using it. How much of the stuff added since mattered to me? Almost nothing. These are the costs we all take on -- death by a thousand cuts -- when we blindly import dependencies.