[zak_mc_kracken]

> What do you do here?

Pick a language where developers are not so cavalier with backward compatibility?

Java has Maven which allows you to exclude transitive dependencies for such situations, and in more than a decade of developing with the language, I've only had to use this functionality a handful of times.

Developers sometimes mess up and break backward compatibility but this should be an extremely rare event. That or the compiler itself is terribly implemented and creating incompatible binaries just by bumping up versions (looking at you Scala).