This used to be true 5-10 years ago. The js ecosystem moves fast and much has been done to fix the dependency sprawl.
Just look at how many downloads some of those packages have today.
Look at the dependency tree for a next or nuxt app.
What the js world did is make their build systems somewhat sane, whatwith not needing babel in every project anymore.
Looks ok to me: https://npmgraph.js.org/?q=next
Ironically, most of the dependencies are actually Rust crates used by swc and turbopack [1][2]. Try running `cargo tree` on either of those crates, it's enlightening to say the least. And of course, Node has a built in file watcher, and even the most popular third party package for file watching (Chokidar) has a single dependency [3].
[1] https://github.com/vercel/next.js/blob/07a55e03a31b16da1d085...
[2] https://github.com/swc-project/swc/blob/b94a0e1fd2b900b05c5f...
React is a dependency of every next application, but I don’t see it there.
Maybe next, the singular package, has fewer dependencies than a project made with next.
[1] https://nextjs.org/docs/getting-started/installation#manual-...