Run npm ls --all on a mid-sized web app and you get a tree that scrolls for pages. It’s accurate and complete, and on the morning a maintainer deletes a package it tells you almost nothing. You can see that tiny-util sits three levels down. You can’t see whether losing it breaks the checkout page or a script nobody has run since spring.

A dependency tree answers “what do I depend on”. The question that matters is “what breaks, and for whom, if this package vanishes or turns hostile”. They need different data. The tree comes from a lockfile. The answer comes from your own source: which functions call the package, which routes, commands and jobs those functions serve, and how much code would change to replace it. A tool that produced that for every package would turn dependency management from an inventory into something a product owner can read.