I personally find the lack of native package management in C++ as a blessing. Go, Python, Rust has it, and this always causes pulling in infinite number of packages for any trivial operation.

sudo-rs was pulling in 1M+ LOC as its dependency chain at one point. I believe they removed the biggest offenders, but I didn't check it recently.

That's one way to look at it, certainly. There are several OK options in that space, e.g. Conan (2) and vcpkg.