axios is actually not that bad, in terms of size. There are definitely worse dependencies you can have. However to me the fact that someone decided to use axios

axios is actually not that bad, in terms of size. There are definitely worse dependencies you can have. However to me the fact that someone decided to use axios in the frontend makes me cautious about everything else. Are they perhaps also using lodash (70kB) for just that one function? Or are they using ramda and lodash at the same time (or any other two packages that contain duplicate functionality)? Don't get me wrong, there are valid reasons to use axios, and I don't have a problem if you communicate those clearly. But I believe few developers make a conscious decision about the tradeoffs, most developers simply dgaf.