It may be fewer but it still doesn't feel good when cargo pulls in hundreds of deps for a seemingly simple application. But maybe it seems simple because of all the deps...
Agreed, but that's the reason why it keeps being a huge problem in JS while other languages only have an eventual small trouble.
But also, almost all of those deps on all simple apps are the same in Rust. They are the same for a large part in JS too, but it's for a smaller part than on most languages.
This; even Golang for medium sized projects (NNCP, Yggdrasil) have about 8-10 deps on average. Rust's dependency chain it's unmanageable for a distro manager.
And that number tends to reduce even more when the ecosystem matures.