Well, I still have to have those on my computer and in my Docker container. And from a trust, auditing and security perspective it’s pretty horrible, even if multi-stage builds can help
With Buble, Flow, and Roll-up, I can get a decent modern environment with as few dependencies as possible. Upsides? Much faster, too. Less disk space. Docker containers build faster, which is better for CI/CD. And it’s easier to understand the codebase and dependency tree, including development tools.
Just to clarify, I'm not disagreeing with you that the current dependency-heavy JS world is madness or that the bloat during development activities is unhelpful. I'm just saying that having a large/complicated development environment is probably a separate issue to having a large application for most other practical purposes, but looking at the size of node_modules will often conflate the two.
With Buble, Flow, and Roll-up, I can get a decent modern environment with as few dependencies as possible. Upsides? Much faster, too. Less disk space. Docker containers build faster, which is better for CI/CD. And it’s easier to understand the codebase and dependency tree, including development tools.