> Every single Ruby post has commentators complaining about dependency hell and steering clear of Ruby apps. This was not the case even a couple of years ago.

Strangely the problems with rubygems and related package managers were apparent five years ago (at my first contact with earnest gem development). It seems the major change is major gems get abandoned—take for example bcrypt. I wonder if the rise in distrust and the rise of abandonded but critical gems are related.

What has changed in the past few years in the Ruby world that has changed dep mgmt? Bundler has been the thing to use for quite a while now, and it used a version lock for all dependencies. It took Node a little while to figure that one out, and shrinkwrap seemingly led to yarn then back into NPM improvements. Ruby is comparatively not that bad, excepting libs with e.g. C dependencies which Node has as well.

That's developers boycotting the language, not users boycotting developers of the language.

It's also worth noting that it's pretty easy to do JavaScript development and just not use NPM, so no-one needs to boycott JavaScript, just that particular installation approach.

Sure, and I actually like java, but you know, blanket "don't use javascript" because it happens to have package manager is dumb. I mean, java has maven. It just so happen to be that package managers are useful things and helps to avoid massive mess in anything larger then hello world. Especially if we are speaking about open source projects.