Where do you find these guys? I haven't worked on a project with more than 20 dependencies, and usually those dependencies have 0 subdependencies so they're quite easy to audit.
The Jest test runner alone has 250 dependencies in its latest version, and v25 had over 500.
I don't audit all the code I run (I don't think anyone does), but I do audit all the code I _release_. What's actually important to you?
There were a few common sources of large runtime dependencies in the past. Like the browserify Node polyfills, babel-polyfill and runtime with core-js, React -> fbjs, Material UI -> JSS and plugins, styled-components.
It's also not trivial to tell whether a dependency you listed under devDependencies is actually imported and consequently bundled into your production build.
Since today we no longer need polyfills and the modern stack with Vite etc. doesn't have a sprawling dependency tree, I think things are now looking much better.
If you read the first comment on your link, you'd see why you're wrong:
> That's not _React_, that's `create-react-app`