As much as people moan about npm community, it does give you many choices and you can avoid complicated massive libs
Good luck auditing that.
.m2/repository is 5 gb on my machine.
Rust crates?
Go packages that are neatly tucked away too?
Node just makes it visible and in your face by putting the node_modules in you project directory.
Besides, what’s the alternative? Write stuff yourself? Put stuff in language stdlib? Even minimal service requires _a lot_ of things to do minimal stuff.