Comment by kelnos

Oh I'm well aware, and that's the problem. Unfortunately none of the available options hit anything close to the sweet spot that makes me comfortable.

I don't think this is a particularly unreasonable take; I'm a relative novice to the JS ecosystem, and I don't feel this uncomfortable taking on dependencies as I do in pretty much any other ecosystem I participate in, even those (like Rust) where the dependency counts can be high.