I agree with his sentiments in the article. I love Rust as a PL, but the situation with certain crates and dependency trees is a bit of a nightmare IMO. It's certainly a trade off.

I recently ripped out the rand crate and replaced it with some much simpler code ported from a C++ codebase. Still does what I need it to do but way fewer LOC and way less complexity. Is it as flexible as what rand and related crates offer? Maybe not, but that flexibility comes at a cost.