Comment by iainmerrick

Yes, I’ve had exactly the same experience. Once you get off the dependency train, it’s almost impossible to get back on.

I don’t think this is specific to any one language or environment, it just gets more difficult the larger your project is and the longer you go without updating dependencies.

I’ve experienced this with NPM projects, with Android projects, and with C++ (neglecting to merge upstream changes from a private fork).

It does seem likely that dynamic languages make this problem worse, but I don’t think very strict statically typed languages completely avoid it.