I think what you mention about breaking packages is not exclusive to R, that's just the result of community driven, open software development. You have to take care of reproducibility in any programming environment, but this doesn't have to do with the entire package eco system. Especially the tidyverse is very exclusive in that, since it is very fast paced and constantly evolving with breaking a lot of old code.

Many popular packages like data.table rarely break after years of version upgrades. But relying on that in any kind of programming language is asking for trouble...

We're using renv since about a year at our workplace and haven't had any major issues occur. Maybe try packrat? Or try conda with R. Otherwise using docker should eliminate most reproducibility issues