I've been there, on both sides, with homebrew ideas pushed from up and down, some that worked nicely, and some that were complete disasters...

And I agree with you. The problems with third party dependencies are way worse than any in-house complete disaster.

But that happens almost certainly because everybody is severely biased into adding dependencies. Make people biased into NIH again, and the homebrew systems will become the largest problems again.

In the two last projects I have worked on I have been lucky to work with great younger developers that neither invent things from scratch nor insist on pulling in exotic dependencies.

We have used mainstream technologies like just Quarkus or Spring Boot and plain React with Typescript and the absolute bare minimum of dependencies.

I have worked with a number of good devs over the years but it is amazing how productive these teams have been. (Should probably also mention that we were also lucky to have great non technical people on those teams.)

"because everybody is severely biased into adding dependencies"

When I make a request to chatGPT to show me a example of something with javascript and node - it always brings me a solution with a external libary needed. So I have to add "without external dependencies" - then it presents me a nice and clean solution without all the garbage I don't need.

So apparently adding yet another libary seems normal for many people, otherwise this behavior would not replicate in an LLM.