Reduce size of dependency graph #1375
Description
Is your feature request related to a problem?
Yes, I'd like Eleventy to be easier to audit and trust as an executable that one would let produce HTML to serve in production to end-users. For those who care, this is not the only part that matters of course. You'd probably want to do some spot-checking on the output and have CSP in place. But I don't think treating the generator as an inherently untrustable/unreviewed black box is reasonable.
I believe the Eleventy code base and community itself is great, fairly auditable, and as a group of maintainers I think the GitHub and npm organisations of Eleventy can also be trusted to oversee itself and not be easily compromised in a way that wouldn't be quickly noticed. However, I don't think I as a user can say the same about all transitive dependencies.
Describe the solution you'd like
For Eleventy to drastically reduce the number of dependencies and publishers required to be trusted for non-dev installations of the @11ty/eleventy package. And ideally for the handful of dependencies that remain (10? 20?) to have been audited by the maintainers of Eleventy, and to have been determined to be responsible, disciplined, well-maintained, and responsive. Perhaps we could even adopt a set of principles around this, such as how Puppeteer (link) and QUnit (link) have done.
This would likely be a long-term effort and include collaborating with maintainers of upstream dependencies. I've done this before and would love to help.
Describe alternatives you've considered
Jekyll 4.1.1 currently has 26 dependencies. Most of which are in turn are dependency-free and well-known standalone packages that solve core problems.
Eleventy 0.9.0 had 555 dependencies.
Eleventy 0.11.0 currently has 372 dependencies. This includes well-known, disciplined, and standalone packages that solve core problems such as mustache and liquid, but also many many others.
This seems to be heading in a good direction, almost a 50% reduction compared to two years ago. If this was part of an existing effort with a tracking issue, feel free to close/merge, I'd love to help out there instead. (I did search but found none.)
Additional context
I'm probably a boring grumpy person, but I care and want to see Eleventy become even more awesome!