> My general view is that package managers (and not the things I made distinctions about) are probably in general a net-negative for the entire programming landscape, and should be avoided if possible.

I am arguing that their "benefits" are only very short-term, if there is actually benefit for them in the first place. The strawman that you present has been repeated already and is not considering that all of those other things are actually useful and good alternatives.

The obvious benefit to me are the automations, I have directly experienced these time benefits

I read you think these automations lead to more harm than good so are a net negative, and I understand that point of view

However, I think this is not a tautology

I think dependency hells and bad dependencies absolutely happen indeed, but are conditioned to badly managed programming projects

And I do not want to suffer from the dumbing down of stripping out package managers