I'm with @jeremyjh on this one. There was no management. There was a "fuck it. works for me." kind-of half-assed implementation that was frankly terrible when compared to ANY of its contemporaries. It spawned a ton of competing "package managers" that attempted to do a better job but none of them "won" (probably because none were officially sanctioned) so you ended up dealing with like six of them in order to manage the dependencies of whatever random project you tried to work with.

No-one "managed" the problem. They just sat and watch the community flail around for years.