Yes, Mojolicious is very self-contained and doesn't have non-core dependencies outside its own ecosystem. However, my recollection is that at least at one point, doing a cpanm Mojolicious or equivalent, actually fetched and installed a list of dozens of dependencies (within that ecosystem, but nonetheless dependencies).

Having said that, I tried this today with Perl 5.38.0 and Mojolicious 9.33, which are current as I write this, and everything was installed in one go. So either they changed something about their packaging, or my recollection is defective. It's certainly still true that Mojolicious consists of dozens of modules.

> fetched and installed a list of dozens of dependencies

Maybe you were on a RedHat with not all core modules installed?

map{substr$_->[0],$_->[1]||0,1}[\*||{},3],[[]],[ref qr-1,-,-1],[{}],[sub{}^*ARGV,3]

The framework is split up into modules, which isn't any different from Dancer or Catalyst in this regard.

To be fair, I never suggested otherwise.