> It is unavoidable to have a truly gigantic amount of (transitive) dependencies, and its rare you go a month of updates without it breaking your app.
I've maintained a sizeable react app for 8 years, and this has not been my experience at all. Maybe 10 years ago things would break monthly but nowadays things are quite stable, with very reasonable deprecation schedules and upgrade paths. I have lots of code running that I haven't touched in 5+ years and it is not causing any problems even when I'm keeping the main parts of the appliaction up to date with modern practices.