A critique of package managers

As I age, I do everything I can to avoid "one more dependency". There's a perverse nerd bragging effect that takes place where people equate their value as a programmer to how many dependencies they can name drop and mash up into their solution. It makes sense, since we evaluate each other, and the more dependencies you can reference in your workpast, the more stepping stones you've stepped on and therefor, been longer on the path.

Anymore, as I evaluate fellow programmers, I'm looking for whether they've discovered "one more dependency" is like signing up for "one more subscription you have to remember to pay for" and what they do to try and mitigate it.

I definitely used to look for reasons to include cool new dependencies that I found, just to try and do something with cool libraries.

But as I got bit by the various issues with dependencies multiple times over the years, I have ended up preferring as few as possible and ideally zero beyond the standard library for hobby projects if I can get away with it.