I can't speak for Perl or Python, but for Ruby I have never seen a single Ruby tool that pulls in anything close to the same order of magnitude of discrete depe

I can't speak for Perl or Python, but for Ruby I have never seen a single Ruby tool that pulls in anything close to the same order of magnitude of discrete dependencies that some JS tools end up doing. I of course stand to be corrected. I don't mind installing tools like Rollup and TypeScript. I do very much mind installing tools like Webpack and Babel.