This is fair, but, the original article mentioned installing a random module on github. A C/C++ library large enough to have distro maintainers, is more akin to a large JS library that has UMD scripts hosted by Cloudflare. In that case, a developer could just do '<script src="https://cdnjs.com/lib.js">' in a html page.

I'm not saying JS is perfect, or that other languages don't have these issues. I haven't used Rails in years but I remember spending a day trying to get a gem installed and figuring out why nokogiri wouldn't compile. Almost every language has these problems.