This is untrue. If you need to update one dependency; npm/yarn will update the lockfile with the minimal changes needed to update that one dependency. You do not need to regenerate the entire lockfile.
Perhaps prop-making in the movie/tv business, prop-makers build one-off things all the time, use them in whatever show/movie they are making, and after filming they are not needed any more.
Deduplication of helper methods is now available in typescript too, using the 'importHelpers' compiler option. It will automatically add import statements to include the helpers from the 'tslib' package, see https://github.com/Microsoft/tslib
