I don't think it's such a stretch. From facebook's yarn announcement[1]:
> or example, updating a minor version of babel generated an 800,000-line commit that was difficult to land and triggered lint rules for invalid utf8 byte sequences, windows line endings, non png-crushed images, and more. Merging changes to node_modules would often take engineers an entire day.
I just did a fresh install in a new directory and ended up with 114M worth of dependencies, so I'm not entirely sure what the difference is.
My point is. 50MB, 114MB, or 500MB worth of javascript dependencies is a massive footprint. It works and I'm relatively happy with what it does, but I don't see this as a stable, long term thing.
[1]: https://code.facebook.com/posts/1840075619545360