You must be very careful about dependencies. I’d sooner take a rule to arbitrarily limit dependencies than lines of code.
But there is something interesting in this idea. Our software is growing immeasurably complex. We’re piling on more and more layers of abstraction. Ostensibly the goal is to make our lives easier. But in reality we’ve got companies throwing hundreds or thousands of developers at the problem of building a wiki or a social network, and they end up building these Rube Goldberg machines where 99% of the effort is spent on things other than the actual problem users want the software to solve.
Moore’s law has been totally offset by Wirth’s law[0], and as an industry I don’t see us doing anything about it. Even if lines of code is the wrong constraint, we could do with learning how to do more with less.