Not all ecosystems are the same in the extent to which auditing and maintaining dependency chains is a burden. All of Linux from Scratch consists of something like less than 90 distinct dependencies, for instance. When I went to add a token-replacement library to mdbook so I can interpolate variables in a book, Cargo pulled in 287 dependencies. For better or worse, the newer, hotter languages of the day seem to be predicated on extremely small, something single-function, libraries, and thus enormous and arguably intractable dependency trees.