The Three Pillars of JavaScript Bloat
The Three Pillars of JavaScript Bloat March 12, 2026 Edit Page Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen significant growth of the e18e community and a rise in performance focused contributions because of it. A large part of this is the “cleanup” initiative, where the community has been pruning packages which are redundant, outdated, or unmaintained. One of the most common topics that comes up as part of this is “dependency bloat” – the idea that npm dependency trees are getting larger over time, often with long since redundant code which the platform now provides natively. In this post, I want to briefly look at what I think are the three main types of bloat in our dependency trees, why they exist, and how we can start to address them. 1. Older runtime support (with…
