Not all gems are created equal. Large amount of gems don't necessarily mean that they are arbitrarily included. In fact, it's often better to pull in a dependency for things that specialize in a particular task because they are more likely to have hardened security and better performance.
The flip side is actually knowing that this "meme generator" gem you are using actually pulls in 50 dependencies, many of which are terribly implemented. I've seen this problem just as rampant in the Node.js and jQuery worlds.
As developers, we should be as aware as possible of the state of our critical apps dependencies. I've recently gone through an app that had over 50 gem dependencies and reduced it to under 20.
One thing that's probably not considered is that testing frameworks (rspec) have tons of dependencies that are not scoped to production. I'm not sure if these reports considered that.
The flip side is actually knowing that this "meme generator" gem you are using actually pulls in 50 dependencies, many of which are terribly implemented. I've seen this problem just as rampant in the Node.js and jQuery worlds.
As developers, we should be as aware as possible of the state of our critical apps dependencies. I've recently gone through an app that had over 50 gem dependencies and reduced it to under 20.
One thing that's probably not considered is that testing frameworks (rspec) have tons of dependencies that are not scoped to production. I'm not sure if these reports considered that.