The problem is not small packages or huge dependency trees. It's the fact widely used packages have to be installed at all. This is compounded by the package manager which allows packages to have independent copies of their dependencies.
We should have a de facto standard library that gets distributed along with the language's reference implementation. Widely-used packages that have a stable and well-designed interfaces should be distributed by default. If something isn't being used anymore, it can be dropped from the standard library while still being available from the repositories.
The problem is not small packages. The problem is there are many of these small libraries trying to solve the same problem (extending the small standard library more). And when there are no clear winners your dependency tree will be full of packages trying to do the same.
We should have a de facto standard library that gets distributed along with the language's reference implementation. Widely-used packages that have a stable and well-designed interfaces should be distributed by default. If something isn't being used anymore, it can be dropped from the standard library while still being available from the repositories.