> I still don't see why dependency management has everyone so up in arms for Go, though. Especially for infrequent use, it's hard to beat just copying the lib into your source tree and re-fetching from git every now and then.

That's not "dependency management", that's step 1 of any development environment setup ever made. It's basically giving up on dependency management and doing everything manually.

The correct way to do dependency management:

Have a config file with all the dependencies, clearly specified, including versions.

Have a tool that has a standard command (mvn install, gradle build, npm install, etc.) without parameters that brings the dependencies locally and makes them available for your local environment.

For the standard command, depending on your environment and philosophy, either fetch sources or fetch sources and compile them or fetch binaries.

To upgrade a library, change the version in the config file and re-run the tool. To add a library, add the library info in the config file and re-run the tool. To remote the library, remove the library info from the config file.

The cognitive overhead is much, much smaller with a well designed dependency management setup. I just run the standard command and it does what I need, no rummaging through Github repos to find what I need.