The default app generated by create-react-app installs 768 transitive dependencies: am I the only one who thinks this is ridiculous?

What does an increasingly granular, sprawling tree of dependencies mean for your project? Is it a problem we all share? What should we be aware of when selecting software to use? Should we do things differently?

Andrew is a freelance software developer, based in Somerset, UK. He spends most of his days programming in Ruby, contributing to open source projects and organising local developer user groups.