Yeah, the initial days were indeed odd, and modules absolutely required, otherwise the ecosystem would probably be a tangle of different 3rd party solutions for vendoring and version-pinning right now. Glad they avoided that.

They were building in the right direction with the idea that a world where public code repositories exist, a) doesn't need yet-another-repository for just one language, and b) should acknowledge the real world by specifying these resources directly in the code.