On the one hand yes, on the other hand it's a large amount of crap just to build a static site. `npm install @11ty/eleventy` pulls 600 packages and yields a 100MB node_modules folder.
Even Sphinx (whose scope goes way beyond static site generation) "only" pulls in about 75MB worth of stuff (a third of that being Babel) over two dozen dependencies (half a dozen being sphinx's own subcomponents).
I refuse to believe that there are real people so eager to jump on the JS hate bandwagon that they unironically believed every word of an obviously satirical article.
(babel has never included a picture of Guy Fieri.)
https://github.com/babel/babel/blob/f36d07d30334f86412a9d277...
But again, people are so ready to froth at the mouth wherever JS is even mildly concerned that I really shouldn't be surprised they'd take a meme that lasted for a handful of days seriously.
Less obvious: You probably wont need Nginx, especially for small static files, in languages where the native servers are fast enough (e.g. http.FileServer)