Encouraged by who? I see the same people which used to install jQuery or WordPress plugins and were able to get janky but working sites. But prolific module authors and node core contributors don't promote these approaches.
Maybe if you listen too much to twitter "thought leaders" you might get this impression, but we are all aware of the problems with social media platforms...
Well, considering the amount of dependencies in popular projects like CRA that was highlighted here a few days ago I don't think it's unreasonable to extrapolate to the general ecosystem. Of course there are module authors and devs doing it differently, but in general most node projects I see are more dependency-happy than projects I see in other languages.
Give people a useful tool (npm) and they will muck it up. This is both the best and worst part of the general node ecosystem. The issue is people saying things like "that's just node". It is not node, it is the ease of use and popularity meaning there will be more of these examples. If you care to make high quality use of the platform and tools you can, but that means not following the crowd.
Maybe if you listen too much to twitter "thought leaders" you might get this impression, but we are all aware of the problems with social media platforms...