Would it be possible to construct the testcases with fewer packages/dependencies? Feels to me like overkill, but maybe that's just a sign of how finegrained and interconnected the node ecosystem is.

I've only seen its usages in frontend framework development where the packages quickly accumulate to the many hundreds, a count that I myself consider a completely unmanageable spaghetti-meatball dish that I just have to trust to "do the right thing and don't do evil".

Compared to that this set appears very modest, I just wonder whether it is not feasible to reduce the set even further (but keep the diversity needed to test the functionality properly).

Hi,

I reduce the number of dependencies by only putting two dependencies on the package.json. The goal is mainly to test the v2 and v3 format of the package-lock.json. (Other cases being tested by other tests)

In nodejs (used in front, but also on the server), some dependencies import smaller modules (sometimes 3 lines), which can quickly have an effect on the number of libraries in a project.

I see indeed simple node.js project (angular, view, nest.js) easily composed of a hundred modules