By being hermetically sealed, the community can make progress on testing, repeatability, and lots of things that would become incredibly difficult if you introduced anything else into the mix.
Moreover, each language gets to innovate in its own way. Cargo is fantastic and fits the needs of Rust quite well. Custom builds, cross compiling, codegen, ...
This is not what they’re arguing for.
> Custom builds, cross compiling, codegen, ...
That’s great, none of that is “package management”.
The point is, every language has a way to specify dependencies, find the correct versions, and download them recursively. Could that piece be made generic?
Tight coupling matters.
> Could that piece be made generic?
Semver has different meanings to different languages based on compiler versions.
Some languages want 100% build reproducibility and hermeticity, and some languages will never get there.
Some languages permit yanking.
Some languages allow binary distributions.
...
These decisions go very deep to the fundamental ethos of the languages themselves. I don't think we'd find any agreement.
Python is an example of a language that can (and historically has) done arbitrary things in package installation https://stackoverflow.com/a/43350802/2751619
I think things have improved, but you didn't used to be able to build a dependency tree without installing all packages and iirc there was a dependency resolution case where pip would download every version counting backwards until one happened to install