[marginalia_nu]

I think it's missing a bit nuance.

Dependencies can be very good, they can provide enormous leverage to actually solve your problems and share the burden of common problems like parsing a json string or compressing to gzip or whatever. In theory at least.

On the other hand, I think a large part of the problem actually comes from dependency managers being a bit too good. It's easy to pull some library and not realize the dependency has massive root system of transitive dependencies, and once that gets settled in your code base it may be difficult to get out.

I think the real problem isn't dependencies themselves, but when dependencies are expected to have dependencies in themselves. I don't think what you get in the end is good, robust software. It gets a sort of flimsy quality where stuff keeps breaking and falling apart and that's just the way it is.