A C++ library author is much more likely to just implement a small feature themselves rather than look for another 3rd party library for it. Adding dependencies to your library is a more involved and manual process, so most authors would do it very selectively.
Saying that - a C++ library might depend on Boost and its 14 million LOC. Obviously it's not all being included in the final binary.
This is conflating Javascript and Rust. Unlike Javascript, Rust does not have a culture of "microdependencies". Crates that get pulled in tend to be providing quite a bit more than "just a small feature", and reimplementing them from scratch every time would be needlessly redundant and result in worse code overall.
Rust may not have "left pad" type micro-dependencies, but it definitely has a dependency culture. Looking at `cargo tree` for the medium size project I'm working on, the deepest dependency branch goes to 12 layers deep. There's obviously a lot of duplicates - most dependency trees eventually end with the same few common libraries - but it does require work to audit those and understand their risk profile and code quality.
It absolutely does by the C/C++ standards. Last time I checked the zed editor had 1000+ dependencies. That amount of crates usually results in at least 300-400 separately maintained projects by running 'cargo supply-chain'. This is an absurd number.
