Steve Litt wrote: "Unfortunately, these guys weren't unusual. Way too
many programmers, in
the name of avoiding reinventing the wheel, integrate somebody else's
wheel, when all they needed was an easily available single spoke. You
know who suffers? The distro maintainers and the users."

That is precisely my programming philosophy.

Like you, I ask, 'Why would anyone include a huge mess of libraries
just to use a few functions?'

I have been using my version of simple-netaid since Devuan's
inception. If someone produces a competitor that is simpler and
lighter on resources, it will definitely be the end of my creation. In
fact, before learning about Firefox, more than ten years ago, I used a
web-browser I wrote based on an activeX object exporting Microsoft
Internet Explorer web-browser engine. Firefox was far better than
trying to tame Internet Explorer in disguise, so I switched without
regrets.