It pulls so many dependencies and the npm situation is frequent topic of conversation here. And the hype makes it attractive target. No idea how MS and Gihub relate to that.
Generally speaking, I agree, the npm-ecosystem still has this pervasive problem that pulling one package can result in many transitive dependencies, but a growing amount of well-known packages try to keep it as limited as possible. Looking at the transitive dependency graph is definitely good (necessary) hygiene when picking dependencies, and when done rigorously enough, there shouldn't be too many bad surprises, at least in my personal experience.