[zbentley]

That's throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Building a C++ project with even a few critical dependencies (e.g. graphics libraries, font libraries, a client for a database or other complex network protocol) is a massive hassle. Sometimes those are curated well, sometimes they're not--but they remain essential for many projects. By taking a hard line against the hypothetical explosion of low-quality dependencies, you compromise the ability to use even the "small, curated, relatively standard set" of dependencies that are genuinely essential.