>Oh, my library converts strings from one encoding to another, I'll make it load files for you, save files for you, download them over the internet, and give you a command line tool, all in the same repo. The library should just do its one thing. The rest should be left to the user.

>I don't know how to solve it. My one idea is to start an "Low Dependency" advocacy group with a badge or something and push to get people to want that badge on their libraries and for people to look for that badge on libraries they choose.

It sounds like you're conflating low bloat and low dependency, which is like trying to have your cake and eat it too. If you want low bloat libraries, then it's likely you're going to be pulling a lot in that don't independently do much. If you want low dependency libraries, then you'll be pulling in a few that do do a lot.

From my perspective I'd rather have slightly fatter libraries if they're low dependency and by authors I trust. Lodash for instance, sure it's big but the es6 module version supports tree shaking and it's basically the standard library JS never had. Same for something like date-fns for Date. I pretty much pull these two in by default into any project to fill those holes in JS's core library.