I see your point, and it is true that nowadays apps and frameworks are bocoming more and more bloated and resource intensive.
Without getting into a long winded OT though, there are advantages to using things like additional redists, nodejs, and the like: an huge amount of tools at your disposal. No need to code sorting, file access, permissions, save data, backup systems, GUIs and so on: download a well known and supported module and you're set.
Want a fancy responsive UI? nodejs runs on chrormium, which means you can use CSS to style it and make it lighting fast. Slow, clunky and unresponsive UIs are fault of the developer not of the frameworks. Also, Chrome does use a lot of RAM, but unlike what common sense may dictate RAM is there to be used. It makes no sense for Chrome to restrict itself to 1GB of RAM when 7GBs are idle on the system.