One advantage (albeit by no means perfect) is that subdepdencies of Ruby gems tend to be much more limited than what you see in NPM (probably largely because yo

One advantage (albeit by no means perfect) is that subdepdencies of Ruby gems tend to be much more limited than what you see in NPM (probably largely because you can only have one version of a gem running in an application). Lots and lots of gems depend on Rails and / or ActiveSupport. There's probably a lot more "glue" gems that are widely used for stuff like HTTP clients. Beyond that though, your typical gem doesn't have an enormous amount of dependencies, and there's a pretty good chance that the dependencies of the top X gems are themselves in the list of top X gems.