> The readme seems to indicate that it expects pytorch alongside several other Python dependencies in a requirements.txt file

That's only if you want to convert the model yourself, you don't need that if you use the converted weights on the author's huggingface page (in “prepared-models” table of the README).

> From the git history, it looks like the username of the person who posted this here is someone who has contributed to the project but isn't the primary author.

Yup that's correct, so far I've only authored the dioxus GUI app.

> If they could elaborate on what exactly they mean by saying this has "zero dependencies", that might be helpful.

See my other response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41812665