The problem is that the modern practices are being adopted to meet the changing needs of this code, which weren't an issue in the enthusiast linux and BSD communities, but are an issue when open source code is being put in mission critical professionally managed production environments on AWS, or into cars and appliances.

The userland is much more complex now, so freezing dependencies and bundling them in order to have a smaller number of test cases may not have been necessary when the environment was smaller and simpler. The reliability expectations were lower, and there weren't big money professional support contracts which required you to validate your application against a set of well defined environments. All that has changed.