Agreed. I think a lot of that is based on Meteor (understandably) pushing their entire stack. I've always been intrigued by their docs which state:

  By default all apps include the meteor-platform 
  package.   This automatically pulls in the packages that 
  make up the core Meteor stack. If you want to build your 
  own custom stack, just remove meteor-platform from your 
  app and add back in whichever of the standard packages you 
  want to keep.[0]

Granted, I've always used the full stack but I'd be interested in seeing some examples of taking a more modular approach at a lower level than adding packages on top of the core stack.

[0] http://docs.meteor.com/#/full/usingpackages