The govulncheck approach (tracing actual code paths to verify vulnerable functions are called) should be the default for every ecosystem, not just Go.

The fundamental problem with Dependabot is that it treats dependency management as a security problem when it's actually a maintenance problem. A vulnerability in a function you never call is not a security issue — it's noise. But Dependabot can't distinguish the two because it operates at the version level, not the call graph level.

For Python projects I've found pip-audit with the --desc flag more useful than Dependabot. It's still version-based, but at least it doesn't create PRs that break your CI at 3am. The real solution is better static analysis that understands reachability, but until that exists for every ecosystem, turning off the noisy tools and doing manual quarterly audits might actually be more secure in practice — because you'll actually read the results instead of auto-merging them.

Part of the problem is that customers will scan your code with these tools and they won't accept "we never call that function" as an answer (and maybe that's rational if they can't verify that that's true). This is where actual security starts to really diverge from the practices we've developed in the name of security.

If you never call it why is it there?