My experience working on tens of front end projects is the complete opposite. Nobody is adding dependencies just for the fun of it, or because you might need it in a year. You add a dependency because you need some functionality and there is no time/budget to re-do it in house - not to mention that if it's a well-supported library with, for example, hundreds of thousands of users, it's unlikely you could even make it better.
What are the actual time cost savings when you take the total costs into consideration?[1][2] What would it look like if you didn't implement an app by stringing together dozens/hundreds/thousands of third-party modules implemented bottom-up, but instead took control of the whole thing top-down?[3]
I agree that using node to write browser client code requires more configuration of the compilation environment than I would like (especially since I have to configure both node and some kind of packer to convert all of my es6 module dependencies into one flat pack JavaScript file).
That's a small up-front one-time cost relative to writing Redux from scratch. And before anyone asks... Yes, our use case is complex enough to justify a local state storage solution based on immutable state curated via actions and reducers. Just as our rendering use case is complex enough to justify React.
