The reason for depending on Boost in this repo is just few search characters away - he needs HTTP/WebSocket implementation and Boost.Beast provides it. The actual bloat here in this repo is conan.
For its credit though, it follows the C++ "philosophy" fairly faithfully. If you don't like Boost you probably don't like C++ either.
Although that download is a monster, I think its like 1.6 GB even compressed. Its not modular at all, some of the modules depend on others and its impossible to separate them out (they've tried in the past)
But last I check there is ALOT they could have removed, especially support for older compilers like MSVC 200x (!), pre C++ 11/older GNU compilers, etc. without compromising functionality. I'm not if they got around to doing that.
