> In many other ecosystems it's not uncommon to run into having issues where certain libraries can't be used together at all.

The same problem exists in Rust, but from the other side.

If I use serde for serialization I am effectively locked in to using crates that implement serde traits (or do newtype hacks to define them myself).

If I want to use something more niche than serde, I essentially lose access to all the popular crates as they only implement serde traits.

Newtypes aren’t hacks, they’re perfectly acceptable in my opinion. Especially if you’re willing to also use a crate like `derive_more`.

for me that is a completely different problem,

one you solve when initially writing code (so you can properly account for it and control it)

instead of a problem which can blow up when you update a package for a very pressing security fix

in the end it a question what is more important, stability or the option to monkey patch functionality into your dependencies without changing them

and given that you can always non-monkey patch crates (rust makes vendoring dep. relatively easy in case upstream doesn't fix things) I prefer the stability aspect (through if you do patch crates you re-introduce many of the issues in a different place, with the main difference of there being a chance to upstream you changes)