> But it's remarkable how many old Perl programs can still pull the dependencies and start right up.

I was surprised when I installed `git` and it pulled a couple dozen Perl packages from the distro repo.

There's definitely something to be said about Linux distro maintainers/packagers being sort of middlemen that help enforce compatibility for popular Perl (or Python2, etc) packages.

That is, there is a nonzero amount of greybeards between the developer and random end user, which cannot be said for your average npm or pip package.