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While I agree that Node's ecosystem is not the best, it's what we have in the frontend world.

If you're working on a Node-based service or React app, you already have to deal with Node and its package ecosystem. Adding a couple of extra MB (or even KB, depending on package reuse) on top of your existing chain of dependencies is a tiny con to the huge benefit of not having to do logic in Bash :)

The problem is that you don’t always know what is actually being executed, shell scripting is risky as it is without the rabbit hole that is the Node dependencies system.

There's always WSH if you're on Windows and will settle for ECMAScript 3. No external dependencies or runtime needed.

zx has a small dependency tree, 12 packages marked as "@types" and 36 regular packages[0].

If you are fluent in Node, it should be easy to avoid further dependencies.

0: https://arve0.github.io/npm-download-size/#zx