Point to me one package in Debian that depends on thousands more.
Oh and I was a maintainer for a major package manager back in the day for crying out loud (was responsible for overseeing the general health of the project as well as directly responsible for maybe a couple dozen individual packages). Never seen this kind of madness.
I'm talking about one actual package that largely runs in a single process (or at least a single process group) with thousands of deps, not some sort of loosely related by category or by using the same framework (hell, we're talking about the framework itself here) package group where failure of one no name package doesn't affect anything else.
Groups are very different from dependencies. And a big meta-package is there for user convenience to get a bunch of stuff. It's almost never going to be depended on; if something needs a package or two from the group it will depend on that directly.
Oh and I was a maintainer for a major package manager back in the day for crying out loud (was responsible for overseeing the general health of the project as well as directly responsible for maybe a couple dozen individual packages). Never seen this kind of madness.