I actually agree with you about which is better but not your reasoning. Dependencies, if stable, are not an automatic negative and Mojo makes some opinionated choices with which I disagree; though don't argue it's the developers' purvue. E.g., Mojo::DOM should not be in Mojolicious. It is useful on its own and would be exactly the same overhead as a dependency.

Mojo has 100ish code modules in it. This means it's not necessarily more stable than a package of, say, 30ish with 20 dependencies. I recognize differing versions come into play here but not as a hard rule.