a friend of mine has a very different solution: he codes everything by hand. he says that the time you need to research to include a new package you can actually use to code the piece you need. and he for sure doesn't have the problems of transitive dependencies

That's been happening to me more often too recently. I find that, for a growing number of simple problems, reinventing the wheel is faster and more efficient than importing a mature, fully-featured dependency.

Depending of the scenario, it can be very fine. E.g. if you just need one or two function call from the dependency. However, for some complex binary protocols it might be better to stick with libraries.

I assume that means he genAIs all his deps? Rather than writing by hand

But now he needs to develop, test and maintain that code. Left pad is easily hand coded, react framework not so much.