alt Hacker NewsYes, basically. Someone who is a dependency maximalist (never write any code that can be replaced by a dependency) then you can easily end up with a thousand dependencies. I don't like things being that way, but others do.
It's worth noting that Rust's std library is really small, and you therefore need more dependencies in Rust than in some other languages like Python. There are some "blessed" crates though, like the ones maintained by the rust-lang team themselves (https://crates.io/teams/github:rust-lang:libs and https://crates.io/teams/github:rust-lang-nursery:libs). Also, when you add a dependency like Tokio, Axum, or Polars, these are often ecosystems of crates rather than singular crates.
Tl;dr: Good package managers end up encouraging micro-dependencies and dependency bloat because these things are now painless. Cargo is one of these good package managers.
How about designing a "proper" standard library for Rust (comparable to Java's or CommonLISP's), to ensure a richer experience, avoiding dependency explosions, and also to ensure things are written in a uniform interface style? Is that something the Rust folks are considering or actively working on?
EDIT: nobody is helped by 46 regex libraries, none of which implements Unicode fully, for example (not an example taken from the Rust community).