I don’t think this is a characteristic of languages or a large ecosystems. It’s a side effect of dependency managers making it seem like zero cost to include an

I don’t think this is a characteristic of languages or a large ecosystems. It’s a side effect of dependency managers making it seem like zero cost to include another library. Including one dependency can end up pulling in an entire ecosystem of connected dependencies, when the perhaps one function in the original dependency. One recent build I did, a small library included a dependency to build its documentation. This was a full-fledged documentation project, which pulled in hundreds more dependencies. It would be interesting to see a display of “cost” in projects indicating how much additional dead weight each individual dependency pulls in. This might lead to slight better decisions on dependencies to choose.