Maybe I'm out of touch, but I think control over dependencies is underrated. It's not just about freezing and pinning. There should be better tooling to support the whole dependency evolution pipeline. For example updates should be reviewed/ingested/integrated/validated based on local policy not based on source release schedule.
This is why some projects will vendor their dependencies - changes within the dependency itself will also be reviewed, and it's easier to locally maintain patches to those dependencies until the patches can be upstreamed.
The problem is, there's a difference between doing that for a handful of C or Go libraries, versus trying to vendor thousands of NPM libraries and all of their interdependencies. So it's very ecosystem dependent.
Agreed. Your self-managed vendoring example is quite near one end of the continuum. I'm suggesting that there might be space for better tooling from there all the way to the NPM end. For example, automated and/or collaborative triage and review of change sets so that you don't see the changes you don't care about, but can easily review and integrate critical fixes.
Maybe I'm out of touch, but I think control over dependencies is underrated. It's not just about freezing and pinning. There should be better tooling to support the whole dependency evolution pipeline. For example updates should be reviewed/ingested/integrated/validated based on local policy not based on source release schedule.