Total dependency count is reasonable for project size

Every production dependency is an additional attack surface: a potential CVE vector, a maintenance obligation, an install-time script that executes on every developer machine and CI run, and an entry in your lock file that must be audited. SSDF PW.4 requires that the software composition be evaluated; an excessive dependency count means you have more components to track, more advisories to monitor, and more attack surface to defend than the project's functionality justifies. CWE-1357 scales with the number of third-party components you rely on. AI coding tools in particular routinely install duplicate-purpose packages — both axios and node-fetch, both dayjs and date-fns — because they generate installs session-by-session without a holistic view of what's already present.

Audit for unused and redundant dependencies:

npx depcheck

For each flagged package, verify it is genuinely unused before removing. Common AI-generated redundancies:

• Both axios and node-fetch — use native fetch (Node 18+)
• Both dayjs and date-fns — pick one
• uuid when crypto.randomUUID() is available natively (Node 14.17+)

Remove confirmed redundancies with npm uninstall and commit the updated package.json and lock file.