Only by choice (i.e., if you as a developer add a bunch of packages to Joystick).

I built Joystick to be fairly lightweight on the dependency side (for the exact frustration your joke is pointing at). The core stuff is using long-term stable dependencies. Anything else I built directly into the framework by hand so it would last long-term and not turn into the goose chase that is the JS world.

I refer to it as the "Honda Civic of JavaScript frameworks" for that very reason.