> I will say that CPAN somehow avoided this problem. I think that is mostly because Perl programmers are far less liberal with dependencies, you don't typically see programs pulling in dozens or hundreds of modules the way you do in node projects. But it's remarkable how many old Perl programs can still pull the dependencies and start right up.

The fact that CPAN avoids this makes me think it's largely cultural. At least some of it may be that CPAN came of age in an era when internet access was less reliable and slower.

Some of it is also that development "in the open" has become more the norm. When releases are rare and only contributors have VCS access, then there are fewer opportunities to depend on unstable interfaces.