I can't help but cringe when looking at the dependency count when using some javascript framework to write client-side code. I think the frameworks and the ecosystem is overly complex and the same could be accomplished by embracing minimalism. I do like things such as babel and webpack though, but those are dev-dependencies which is unrelated to the contents of the final bundle and I can live with few dev dependencies.

For my last project I wrote just plain old javascript without any frameworks, but I did use dev dependencies such as the ones I mentioned above. It was a breeze to implement things, but I do understand that the benefits of frameworks like React become clear in larger more complex projects. So all in all I don't really know what should I think about the current state of the ecosystem, nor am I really on the edge of the wave of progress, but the kind of feelings I often get is in the lines of 'is this dependency x really needed here? what does it do? oh it does this small little thing, why is it here??'...