> "be careful all the time" doesn't scale

Yes, this is the C attitude, where you provide no safety rails or poka-yokes or, indeed, package managers, and therefore you get a lot of fragile reimplementations of package managers (autoconf, anyone?). But you get to keep the satisfaction of blaming the users.

nuget is pretty good. It helps that packages tend to be substantial things, not left-pad.

> autoconf, anyone?

GNU Autoconf isn't a package manager, it's more an analogue to a setup executable on MS Windows, to detect where the user wants stuff to be installed, where the user has stuff already installed and which features the user wants.

> It helps that packages tend to be substantial things, not left-pad.

Agree, this is IMHO also a better pattern. 1-liners or even 20-liners are not worth the overhead of extracting a package. Or of depending on a package.