> How is that any different from build tooling for any other language?

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).