This isn't reducing complexity, it's just taking all the junk you'd normally have in your bloated boilerplate and putting it directly into the build tool. I'm not convinced that's a good idea.
- Xcode, for iOS/Mac Development, is usually around 5GB (and
no, even if you remove every single simulator, it's still over 100-200MB).
- Android Studio is roughly the same deal as Xcode.
- I've not used Windows so I can't say for sure, but I'd be surprised if the various tech there doesn't follow this pattern.
Xcode and the Android SDK each come from a single vendor who provides an integrated development stack and presumably vets the contents. Does anybody do that with these npm packages?
It seems like every time I run the du command in my node_modules folder, I find some crap that shouldn't be there. Earlier this year, I submitted a PR that reduced the size of the babel react preset install footprint by about a third, just by removing a totally unused dependency that nobody noticed. I don't think the contents of npm packages get nearly enough scrutiny and it scares the hell out of me.
[1] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/52-percent-of...
It's crazy to me that a package that is downloaded from npm over 4 million times a month gets so little scrutiny that nobody but me noticed a 5MB dependency on all of lodash that wasn't even being used.
With various CI setups and some server-side rendering configurations, there are potentially scenarios where build tooling actually do run in environments where there are higher risks, though it's not as applicable in this specific case.
If I put the answer on the internet, then thousands of people benefit. If my work only save you five minutes one time, it still may be worth the bother in the grand scheme of things.
Which is a long way around to my point: this group is curating a bunch of build related modules which means I don't have to pay as much attention. That's not automatically a win (especially if they do a poor job of keeping up, which happens a lot in this space), but it has potential at least to be pretty useful.
Well, npm may implement some kind of content-addressable storage to transparently deduplicate the dependencies tree on disk. It's not quite easy to do well.
As long as your bundle size is small, and the build times are fast, it's a clear improvement, at the expense of spending like 0.15% of even the cheapest 60GB SSD.
If you have some simpler, better alternative to html, css, and JavaScript for websites, more power to you. Over here in the real world, though, we've got stuff to do.