[eatonphil]

You're also exposing yourself to potentially needless breaking changes and many libraries that aren't well tested or don't have static types. Or growing in size because of optional dependencies but build tools and languages without builtin support for keeping unneeded optional dependencies out of the imported code.

[nerdponx]

This seems like an ecosystem cultural problem. In Python, I can't think of a single time I have experienced an "uncontrolled" breaking change (i.e. without an announcement and long deprecation period) in any important library that wasn't in some kind of alpha state, and I've never needed to rely on an alpha-quality library for anything in production.