What, you don’t? Each dependency comes with a license notice. Everything needs to be pinned. The npm mess that comes out of pinning and unbounded versioning is precisely why we steer clear of it.
Of course we are.
Not manually, of course, but we've got automated tools that generate a report of every dependency, including transitive dependencies, and its license and version, for all the platforms we use. We definitely keep an eye on these reports.
"But it's haaaaarrrrd" isn't a great excuse for letting things get out of control. We're developers. Taking obnoxious labor-intensive manual processes and making them quick and easy is the entire reason why our profession exists in the first place.
(Granted, the fact that a single import can bring in hundreds or even thousands of transitive dependencies to worry about is a big reason why I avoid the Node ecosystem like the plague. So there is that.)
If ops does their job well, that's great. A lot of people aren't that effective at their jobs, and if someone in ops is stuck in PHP Land, unwilling to learn Docker, they're going to become a huge bottleneck in short order. Some people are incompetent, but there is a lot of people who don't particularly like their jobs yet get a sadistic joy out of playing the gatekeeper role, being the ultimate decider of whether someone else gets what they want. All the worse if upper management sides with them by default since, well, they're the "webmasters".
Yeah, I'm pretty biased because I've had situations like that on a few occasions.
I'm not necessarily saying that the production situation is always improved by Docker, but what I described is not an uncommon situation and I think it often leads to teams gravitating towards Docker when their last person in ops finally leaves.