Not a surprise, Rust has attracted the Node.js crowd and they've brought their packaging philosophy with them, if not their love for reinventing the wheel every few weeks.

lightweight refers to resource utilization; it's disingenuous to pretend that has anything to do with compile-time dependencies.

To be fair this is a problem of the Rust web ecosystem. Include a few de-facto standard Rust web crates and you're up to 200 transitive dependencies