Boost is (was?) considered to be such a heavy dependency (especially in the days before distribution package managers and build systems got their act together and collaborated or at least acknowledged the reciprocal efforts of one another) that it's probably single-handedly responsible for easily at least half of the so-called "NIH" libraries/ad-hoc solutions I encountered for a particular decade of my career as a C++ developer.

At one point, I had a curated SVN repository of certain boost header-only includes that didn't require any sort of build integration, had no dependencies of their own (even other boost libraries), and didn't require any build system integration - and I know I wasn't the only one.

The world of native software development was just so unbelievably different from that of web development - it's really no surprise developers from that lived through that era have such a hard time accepting the modern-day age of PWAs in Electron sandboxes masquerading as native programs. People that cut their teeth developing desktop software with something like Python (just as an example) instead would have a completely different perspective on all this, of course.

I’m afraid that’s a very JS viewpoint. A dependency doesn’t need dependencies itself to be heavy.

Start using some of the heavier weight sub-libraries and you can quickly explode your compile times. I have boost beast/asio on one project and it takes over a minute to compile one of the source files…

Try debug anything in boost. I didn't enjoy it. It's a heavyweight dependency, all on its own.

it's pretty heavy, as boost has quite some inter-dependencies, pulling one of its component can bring in a few others.