This is conflating two things: the granularity of system utilities and the granularity of packages. Those are not the same thing. GNU core-utils provides 24 sep

This is conflating two things: the granularity of system utilities and the granularity of packages. Those are not the same thing. GNU core-utils provides 24 separate utilities into a single package. Add in sed, grep, and bash, which has built-ins providing virtually everything else, and you're pretty close to full POSIX with only four packages, thus four dependencies. At the language level rather than system utilities, think of something like boost. You install one dependency, and you get hundreds of individual libraries, each of which does only one thing and one thing well, and you can link only what you need into your own program. UNIX philosophy followed, without turning your dependency tree into combinatorial explosion.