Webpack is no-doubt a big program with a lot of features. But I have several even-bigger programs on my PC that clock in at just a few mb - so saying it has a lot of features doesn't answer OP's original question, it simply substitutes an easier question and then answers with a "the size is what the size is" tautology.
When a native app links a static library, it performs dead-code elimination. It might have hundreds of megabytes of dependencies, but the overwhelming majority is not copied to the application. When I make a new rails project I don't download the text-source of Firefox or MySQL and all their downstream dependencies into every project root. There's no reason webpack has to do this, except because of arbitrary workflows imposed by NPM.
If no user-complaint about NPM is ever quantified or interrogated, then NPM will fade into irrelevancy.