My point was that a lot of older software, especially desktop apps, did not have such wild dependencies. Therefore this was less of an issue. Today with Python and with JavaScript and its NPM hell it is of course.
Anyone who worked with Perl CGI and CPAN would tell you managing dependencies across environments has always been an issue. Regarding desktop software; the phrase "DLL hell" precedes NPM and pip by decades and is fundamentally the same dependency management challenge that docker mostly solves.