It's hard to pinpoint what the problem really is, but me and a few colleagues had corrupted brew installations lately, where various things would just randomly stop working after updating a single package.

The trick of disabling auto updates doesn't really work when you do want things to be updated. Sometimes there are conflicts and the usual path was to upgrade everything.

Not that it matters: it seems that the usual "upgrade everything" from 2 years ago has changed into "delete every folder and reinstall everything from scratch".

Also, a few years ago, updating everything or reinstalling lots of things from scratch was fast. Now, it requires much more time due to the massive number of dependencies every single package has.

Also, the maintainers have a super weird aversion to everything that is "too simple". I've seen packages rejected because "the build process was too simple and there are no dependencies". The excuse was that "users can build it themselves". This is not for silly stuff random people wrote on weekend, this is for 20 year old tools used in production written in C.

I can't say for certain why or how it got worse for other people, but for me it started when they doubled down on dynamic linking. That's why installing takes 5x the time it used to, takes more disk space, breaks all the time and makes organising your tools a fucking mess.

As for me: I've replaced most of my Brew usage with Docker (for most development tools) or with static binaries compiled weekly using Github Actions (for cli tools like youtube-dl, etc). I'm also using download links straight from language websites (Rust, Ruby, Python, DotNet, Haskell).