I’m not an HTML purist, JS is fine, but I prefer to use it only where it’s necessary. The main thing that’s bad about massive dependency trees in my mind is th

I’m not an HTML purist, JS is fine, but I prefer to use it only where it’s necessary. The main thing that’s bad about massive dependency trees in my mind is that it makes them difficult to keep a mental map of, which makes for pain when things go awry. Most of the work I do is on iOS apps which is a generally more “batteries included” environment, and there most dependencies only go a level or two deep, which is reasonable to reason about and makes it more practical to track down problems. iOS apps also just don’t need as many dependencies in the first place. It’s not practical for web front end to require as few dependencies as e.g. iOS, but I think it’s a worthwhile endeavor to push that line as far as it can go so it’s more practical to develop a complex low-dependency web app.