Package management is easier in Go than almost any other ecosystem, including Rust, Python and Javascript. And Go projects may have tens of package dependencies. Yet it's closer to a C++ project which has single-digit dependencies than a Javascript project which has tens of thousands.

Interesting. When I learned Go a while ago, it didn't have a package manager. You just pulled down master branches directly into your global GOPATH. So pulling in a dependency was a big decision and people naturally favored "batteries included" libraries. That probably still permeates the culture today.

That is the package manager. The package has a URL. You import the URL and you're done.

Back then there was no versioning. When you imported a URL, you had to hope that all your projects and transient dependencies happened to be compatible with whatever commit was currently sitting on the master branch. Because one update could silently break an unrelated project on your machine, adding a dependency was a bigger decision. That naturally led the ecosystem to favor fewer, larger libraries.

PS: it looks like this issue was addressed in 2019 with the introduction of Go Modules.