But if you're using React you are creating a not-insignificant webapp and the initial install time of 177 modules is totally irrelevant beyond that first install. It doesn't have any reflection on the size of the client JS file (webpack loaders, for example, only live on the dev machine).

Moreover, you can presumably globally install this, so it can cover every React-based project you need to build.

What is an acceptable number of modules?

Surely the important bit is the size of the code that's served to the end user, not the size of the development environment?

My Visual Studio install is easily at least 4GB, yet this doesn't matter to the end user as the packages produced are about 6MB total

That's Node, baby. Deal with it.