A critique of package managers

> "This is the automation of dependency hell. The problem is that not everything needs to be automated, especially hell. Dependency hell is a real thing which anyone who has worked on a large project has experienced. Projects having thousands, if not tens of thousands, of dependencies where you don’t know if they work properly, where are the bugs, you don’t how anything is being handled—it’s awful.

This the wrong thing to automate. You can do this manually, however it doesn’t stop you getting into hell, rather just slow you down, as you can put yourself into hell (in fact everyone puts themselves into hell voluntarily). The point is it makes you think how you get there, so if you have to download manually, you will start thinking “maybe I don’t want this” or “maybe I can do this instead”. And when you need to update packages, being manual forces you to be very careful."

I sympathise with this, but I have to respond that we have to live within existing ecosystems. Getting rid of npm and doing things manually won't make building SPAs have fewer dependencies, build would be incredibly slow and painful.

> Getting rid of npm and doing things manually won't make building SPAs have fewer dependencies, build would be incredibly slow and painful.

You don't think making adding dependencies incredibly slow and painful would make people have fewer of them?