Dependencies are totally out of control, in much of OSS, not just Homebrew. I probably have 5-6 leaf node packages that I actually installed with brew install, but brew list shows close to 100 little dependencies. Same with apt on my Ubuntu/Debian systems. I physically installed a handful of applications but my system has hundreds of packages installed. At least it’s not DLL Hell: the dependency management tools are great and uninstallation is clean, but wow what an explosion of quantity of dependencies!

I don’t use node but I understand it’s a mess there too.