I can partly understand the poster above: Some people (including me) for example want and have to use JavaScript, but simply don't want to get dragged into that whole node.js/npm ecosystem for various reasons.

I avoid any tool which forces me to pull in a gazillion npm packages, while I gladly use esbuild for example because it looks and feels like a nice little compact tool.

I feel the same way about python, but I don’t blame python authors for using the python ecosystem to write python tools when I am forced to use a little python. I consider python to be an essential part of any build system since it’s used in so many places, as much as I don’t like it.

Maybe the problem people have is that node/npm are becoming a similarly “essential” build system piece much like python. That much I can certainly understand.