50% of the popularity of modern languages like golang and rust comes from the fact that building and dependency management is light years ahead of older languages.
remind me again on what that has to do with either the syntax or the semantics of the underlying programming language.
Your original argument was that the ease of dependency management doesn't change programming or the act of programming. I feel it encourages a compartmentalized approach to writing programs, pulling in dependencies as needed rather than relying on a giant library like Boost. Thus it does actually change the "act of programming", which is a vague term that can mean anything.
This is not mentioning all the upsides of having a easy build system from easy learning and community standpoints.
simple, ease of integrating external libraries into a project has _nothing_ to do with the programming language.
they are at best two orthogonal topics.