I don't think most people run into this because most backend node programmers have moved to Go at this point, so they're not aware of the upgrade problems.
How does Go solve this?
How does Go solve this?
While Go doesn't have package management, it does have a framework (go get) for automatically fetching and compiling dependencies. However, people quickly realized that there's no way to pin dependencies; it will always fetch the master branch's HEAD, so if you "go get" a project, it will fetch some arbitary version depending what time of day it is. The community has devised various ways around it, and recent versions of Go have a way of resolving packages to a local "vendor" directory, but it's not a solved problem. There's no solution that stands out from the rest as particularly good or feature-complete when you look at the historical alternatives (Ruby's Bundler in particular).
But that may just be me. I think the same thing about generics, and others clearly don't.
FWIW, I've been using Go 1.5's vendoring alongside govendor and it seems pretty nice. While this situation is a bit of a disappointment given the generally awesome tooling in Go, it's hopefully something that will be resolved soon.
Brittle.
Before dismissing Go, please try to understand its history and the fact that it is changing.