I'm not sure what it is about the node development environment but you are right. I haven't seen such wildly complicated dependency trees in any other language. Literally hundreds of modules can come together to make even simple applications.

Is there an idiom or ethos in node land that aims for tiny re-usable packages? I am not criticising if there is, just genuinely curious.

I have been writing JS applications for years and it's only since node and npm hit the scene that this has occured.