I would go as far as saying anyone who does not have control and awareness of their dependencies is asking for trouble. VM be damned.

That's part of the reason I feel uncomfortable with "modern" package systems like golang's. I really want to use golang more, but I just don't feel 'secure' about building a bunch of packages pulled off of github by URL.

Third-party package management is not a modern marvel by any means. You are unnecessarily singling out golang, and if you let that stop you from learning it's your loss. Just be smart. Dependency awareness is not black magic.

odd golang has a better security story than npm, rubygems, and python. it'll at least crypto ensures the dependency code hasnt been modified since you first retrieved it iirc.

the rest is up to you as a developer to ensure its safe.

Not only that, you could end up shipping malicious code to your customer.

How would a dev vm prevent this? Vms can still call out to the internet.

No host FS or clipboard access means it would be rendered useless.

Hmmm, that depends on the virtualisation solution being used.

If someone's using (say) VMware Workstation or Fusion, if they've loaded the VMware tools into the VM it can share the clipboard and be configured with access to the hosts filesystem (at defined points).

If you set it up that way it will. If you are doing this intentionally then just don't set it up that way.