Well, Next is kinda like that then. It takes care of the sub-dependencies for you and when you upgrade, you just upgrade to the next major Next version (which isn't necessarily easy, but more so than upgrading 100 individual packages). They provide codemods for some stuff too.
I suspect that most rails, or next, projects add additional dependencies than just the framework. Generally the framework isn't the issue in my experience.
Sure, but it's not an either/or situation. Every big project adds dependencies, but using Next means you have some basic, common functionality included out of the box by default/by convention (like TypeScript, linting, testing, routing, caching, SSR, static builds, serverless definitions, etc.) all done in a predefined way. Maybe your project has 200 deps, but Next would replace like 50 of the big ones that you'd otherwise have to separately install and maintain. Just having a basic page/app router and minimal state system (via contexts and RSC and props and such) reduces a lot of the headaches of the bad old React Router days.
It replaces "React soup of the day" with a more standard "recipe" shared by most Next projects – like "Grandma Vercel's secret React minestrone", I guess. But yes, projects would typically still add their own "spices" on top of those basics.
