You can "eat the cake and have it too" with something like this: http://microjs.com/
Basically you import everything you need and only what you need. Need extend? No prob: http://microjs.com/#extend - just pick one. And with browserify and npm literally everything you need to do to include a library in your project is a single command, so having to include "that many libraries" is not really a problem.
I'm a huge fan of having many little libraries instead of a few big ones, and JS - both on the backend and frontend - makes this possible to the bigger extent than most other environments.
Same. Between Micro JS, Vue.js and Browserify, I can craft the perfect tech stack with best-of-breed libraries, and come out with a much smaller, faster, and less janky site at the end of it. Oh, and being CommonJS modules via Browserify makes life pretty great, and my code maintainable and easy to follow!
Basically you import everything you need and only what you need. Need extend? No prob: http://microjs.com/#extend - just pick one. And with browserify and npm literally everything you need to do to include a library in your project is a single command, so having to include "that many libraries" is not really a problem.
I'm a huge fan of having many little libraries instead of a few big ones, and JS - both on the backend and frontend - makes this possible to the bigger extent than most other environments.