The lack of a standard library is definitively a major factor and the way npm solves the Diamond Dependency Problem exacerbates the issue by an order of magnitu

The lack of a standard library is definitively a major factor and the way npm solves the Diamond Dependency Problem exacerbates the issue by an order of magnitude. Not only is everyone pulling in dozens of packages that do simple things, you also end up pulling in dozens of versions of each of those packages because package developers aren't forced to flatten their dependency trees. And since no one is forced to do do this, using something like 'yarn install --flat' yourself is a huge pain. If we had a proper standard library and a sane package manager with flat dependency resolution by default, bundling just the parts of the standard library we need for the web would be easy (browserify has existed for a long time).