Same problem with JavaScript's NPM. And Python's PIP.
I write in Clojure and I take great pains to avoid introducing dependencies. Contrary to the popular mantra, I will sometimes implement functionality instead of using a library, when the functionality is simple, or when the intersection area with the application is large (e.g. the library doesn't bring as many benefits as just using a "black box"). I will work to reduce my dependencies, and I will also carefully check if a library isn't just simple "glue code" (for example, for underlying Java functionality).
This approach can be used with any language, it just needs to be pervasive in the culture.
Author here. We could make it a language problem by having the language sandbox dependencies by default. Seems like an easy win to me. Technical solutions are almost always easier to implement than social solutions.
> It's throwing the baby and bathwater into lava.
Is it really so controversial to want to be able to limit the access that utility crates like humansize or serde have to make arbitrary syscalls on my computer?
Seems to me like we could get pretty far with just compile-time checks - and that would have no impact whatsoever on the compiled code (or its performance).
I don't understand your criticism.