Since when is using two libraries (typescript and babel) considered mashing a massive number of things together?

If you don't want to leverage Gulp to easily automate your build process then don't.

If you don't want to use NPM to download packages then simply download the .zip archive on Github,

(1) It's three: gulb, typescript, and babel.

(2) It's hundreds more

    $ npm install
    $ jq '.dependencies | length' < package-lock.json
    176

IDK what "blind mashing" would be if not this.

Do you count the number of vendor DLLs when you develop .NET applications using third party libraries? Of course libraries will have dependencies.

You are only "blindy mashing" three libraries here. Gulp to manage your workflows, Typescript (because that's the goal of your workflow) and Babel to allow older browsers to read modern Javascript. You can cut Babel out of it if you develop something for a modern browser (internal apps, mostly).

That's three widely used dependencies. There is nothing obscure about them at all. The only questionable choice in that tooling chain is Gulp. The reason I used gulp here is that it's very easy to use it to output simple Typescript. Something such as Webpack and Browserify would be for bundling modules and that's an advanced topic.