Yea most dependencies in Rust land are entirely avoidable. Most even easily (like left-pad), sometimes its hard like a wasm engine. This wasm engine is the result of us trying to avoid a dep on a wasm engine from the ecosystem. It bloated the build time of our IDE by 300% to just include it (we were just 25% of the buildtime if i include wasmtime). Now was that a good idea? I don't know but we're getting very close now to a full product whilst still compiling in release build with all deps in <10s on a new mac. I'm personally really opposed to using small convenience libraries. Just write the code you need in a 'slightly less convenient way'. Use the standard library if you can. No need to pile on say entire networking stacks if you can talk to the platform networking apis for instance.

> its weird how good pkg mgmt has this totally shit side effect for compilation,

that's because the package management tools aren't amazing, those would distribute prebuilt stuff pluggable into your project with close to 0 build time overhead vs. today where everyone has to constantly build all the deps