This is probably one of the bigger issues holding me back from adopting Deno (at least for personal projects anyway). I'm sorry, I don't want to go back to early 2000s where we're copy pasting random links to script tags. Those days are over and for the better. NPM has proved pretty much undeniably that people prefer the simplicity of just typing in the name of something to install it, and import it. Does it have issues? Absolutely. I'd rather those issues be resolved than completely throwing away the concept though.

This feels to me a bit like if a new browser came around and said "DNS is the root of all evil" and only allowed you to directly type in the IP address of websites.

You can make all kinds of excuses, like "oh, but you can keep a list of your own!" or "hey, you can install this plugin that gives you DNS lookups back", but ultimately as a user I'm gonna say "No thanks, I'll keep using a browser that doesn't needlessly complicate my day."

I'm usually an early adopter for this kind of stuff, and I really like a lot about Deno, which is why this situation just makes me very sad.