> C, C++, Bash, and Perl

While I agree with your comment, lumping these together somehow doesn't seem fair. As for C and C++, it took decades to develop package managers, and we can't still say we have standard ones (but I feel Conan is a de facto standard PM for C++).

Bash, on the other hand, should never have 'batteries included' because in this case the batteries are the rest of the system - coreutils and the rest. An Perl had CPAN quite early on, in the early nineties iirc.

C is completely without batteries, the stdlib for C++ was a great change and a big force towards people adopting it. The same happened with Bash and Perl (and people did migrate a lot of things into the later).

If someone releases a module that depends on nine other modules then their module will likely be promoted by the authors of the other modules, rinse and repeat.