I'm not sure I understand this issue. The existence of a standard package manager doesn't prevent you from manually vendoring dependencies if you want to. I have personal experience working on node.js projects where several dependencies were just `cp` into a directory and treated like local modules, no npm involved at all.

It's like `apt` or `brew` for system dependency management. It is there if you want it but you can just as well download a tar and config/make/install yourself if you want.

In many ways, it is like a standard lib. No one forces you to use it. If you prefer the simplicity of your own implementations then I see no reason why you can't just write your own.

But when you want the advantages of a package manager, and there are advantages that you may not appreciate but others do, then having a standard one built into the language feels preferable to having a dozen non-standard independently competing variations that the community cobbles together.