I mostly share GP's sentiment, although they didn't argue their point very well.

> As in, things were fine before we had commonplace tooling to fetch third party software?

Yes. The languages without a dominant package manager (basically C and C++) are the only ones that have self-contained libraries, that you can just drag into your source tree.

This is how you write good libraries - as can be seen by the fact that for many problems, there's a powerful C (or C++, but usually C) library with minimal (and usually optional) dependencies, that is the de-facto standard, and has bindings for most other languages. Think SDL, ffmpeg, libcurl, zlib, libpng/jpeg, FreeType, OpenSSL, etc, etc.

That's not the case for libraries written in JS, Python, or even other compiled languages like Go and Rust - libraries written in those languages come with a dependency tree, and are never ported to other languages.