I think the suggestion was that there's this crazy explosion of transitive dependencies because JS is not 'batteries included' with some standard library that c

I think the suggestion was that there's this crazy explosion of transitive dependencies because JS is not 'batteries included' with some standard library that covers quite a lot of what people want. If there's no standard library, you have to include some libraries to do what you want. Those libraries had no standard library to depend on either, so they had to do the same thing you did. And so on.