A critique of package managers

This article, although is trying to provide some arguments as for why package managers are "evil", I found the argumentation pretty weak/non-descriptive. It's good if you have the experiences that confirm a specific point of view, but I think these experiences need to be explained in some more detail, because people reading your article may have similar experiences and therefore would find it hard to agree with your points - just like me.

To give a concrete example, you said that javascript does not have a definition of a "package" in its langauge. But what does that really mean, and why should it lead to package manager managers? Because for me, a person who has worked with javascript just a little bit, I know package.json exists and most of the package managers I've worked with agree on what the contents of this file mean. If we limit our understanding to just npm, yarn and probably bun, we don't see how that causes or contributes to the dependency hell problem (sure it exists, but how?).

You said that Go mitigates the issue of dependency hell to some degree, but this is an interesting thought, give it more exploration! Why should something like Go not have this problem not be not as severe as in Javascript?

I may not remember the details of what you said in the article and I would like to check, but currently I can't access the site because it times-out for me.

package.json is a convention, not a language definition, hence package managers may implement "package" management differently; in reality conventions are followed, until they aren't, and that's where hell begins (if something can be abused - it will be); go and odin define package in the language itself as a folder containing source files, and they mitigate many management issues by just having a good standard library, so you wouldn't need as many packages to begin with;