Ok, I concede it is possible. Just like going to the moon is possible. But in practice everything I see that pulls in the node ecosystem even peripherally suffers from this. 100's of dependencies are not rare at all, and some of those on the most obscure packages.

You aren’t wrong. After years of seeing things going that way, I’m hyper critical of any new additions I make to my own software or anything my team is working on.

Couldn't agree more. To expand on the point a bit I feel that Node (and JS in general, and other wildin' langs like C++ too) mostly have disadvantages that can be circumvented with discipline while keeping their advantages intact. Go and related crew on the other hand impose discipline as a language feature, and if you circumvent it (if you even can) you're missing much of the point of the language.