Applications that are worked on less frequently should have fewer dependencies.

If you work on the application every day then you can afford to have lots of dependencies, because you can keep on top of updates as they are released and test the application with new dependencies.

If you tend to go months or even years between working on the application then you should reduce the number of dependencies as much as possible.

If you’ve got lots of dependencies and you only try to update them once a year then you invariably find yourself in some level of dependency hell.