I agree with this and it's something I've encountered when just trying to understand a codebase or track down a bug. There's a bit of the tail wagging the dog as an increasing proportion of commits are "meta-code" that is just tweaking config, formatting, etc. to align with external tools (like linters).

> Unless there's actually reason to change code (eg. some genuine refactoring a human thinks is actually needed, a bug fix or new feature, a tool exposed a real bug, or at least some identifiable issue that might turn into a bug), it should be left alone.

The corollary to this is "Unless there's actually a need for new features that a new version provides, your existing dependency should be left alone". In other words things should not be automatically updated. This is unfortunately the crazy path we've gone down, where when Package X decides to upgrade, everyone believes that "the right thing to do" is for all its dependencies to also update to use that and so on down the line. As this snowballs it becomes difficult for any individual projects to hold the line and try to maintain a slow-moving, stable version of anything.