Separate from the discussion of whether super small modules and hundreds or thousands of deps are a good idea, is the point of operational stability.
Putting on your devops hat, whatever your dependencies, from a reliability and reproducibility point of view, you should control your reliance on unexpected decisions of npm or third-party developers. A lot of the panic with npm issues comes from people blindly using the npm registry and then seeing breakages, with no safety net. I hate to say "I told you so" but this is an issue we worried about a lot when considering Node productionization last year: https://medium.com/@ojoshe/fast-reproducible-node-builds-c02...
Putting on your devops hat, whatever your dependencies, from a reliability and reproducibility point of view, you should control your reliance on unexpected decisions of npm or third-party developers. A lot of the panic with npm issues comes from people blindly using the npm registry and then seeing breakages, with no safety net. I hate to say "I told you so" but this is an issue we worried about a lot when considering Node productionization last year: https://medium.com/@ojoshe/fast-reproducible-node-builds-c02...