Comment by smitherfield

Without addressing the wisdom or lack thereof of including dependencies for small functions, perhaps the problem of disappearing/changing small dependencies could be solved with an option along the lines of

    npm install <small-dependency> <destination> --save-inline

Which would just copy the dependency verbatim to <destination>. Maybe have a "<dependency> is 100kb. Are you sure you wish to copy the entire source to <destination> instead of using a 'require' reference? y/n" prompt for the inevitable silly types who'd do it with Angular.