It's not really hell though, is it? Hell is infinite pain and agony. This is more like an occasional bother.
Yes, we get comically large numbers when we look through node_modules. But, real "dependency hell" is when you have situations that take unbounded manual effort to resolve.
How often do we end up with impossible circular dependencies? Or conflicting versions clobbering each other? Or non-deterministic builds introducing random behavior?
That all is commonplace even today with other platforms like python, and rarely an issue with node. I'd much rather occasionally sneer at the size of node_modules than any of that actual hell.
Yes, exactly. I used to think isolating dependencies like npm/yarn do, where each package has its own copy of its own dependency tree (ignoring deduping), was crazy, and potential conflicts should be a forcing function to encourage you to minimize dependencies in the first place. But then I started using these systems and it's by far the least time I've ever spent worrying about deps. There are downsides to this and how it encourages dependency proliferation, and I still believe in minimizing your dependencies, but it's the least bad system I've seen.
In my experience is the people who complain most audibly about npm are the same folks who think nothing of spending a few days debugging classpath issues.
Yes, we get comically large numbers when we look through node_modules. But, real "dependency hell" is when you have situations that take unbounded manual effort to resolve.
How often do we end up with impossible circular dependencies? Or conflicting versions clobbering each other? Or non-deterministic builds introducing random behavior?
That all is commonplace even today with other platforms like python, and rarely an issue with node. I'd much rather occasionally sneer at the size of node_modules than any of that actual hell.