And 997 of those are development tooling dependencies that are not included in the application that you eventually deploy.

Don't get me wrong, I would rather there were fewer development dependencies too, but they are tooling abstractions that you are _opting-in_ to.

If that is still a cognitive burden, then there's nothing to stop you using React a build step through a CDN.

And you just need 1 to fail to break the whole chain (think to backdoored / taken over npm packages)

Your ls command may create columns. To list one item per line and count the lines: `ls -1 | wc -l`

ls usually switches to one column automatically when it's output is piped: https://i.vgy.me/cNfMzV.png

Most of those don't wind up in production.