Could it be a strange mindset of our time that we look to language ecosystems to provide this? What if we could manage dependencies without being locked into language?

Conda goes some way. Think of something like virtualenv, but not specific to python. I would be happier with something that had fewer features than conda, but where critical features were easier. Example: setting up a package server should be trivial.

I think we do not yet have the git of dependency systems, with the gravity to draw in the community and for people to regard it a solved problem. Maybe the most efficient route would be: find a way to get Linus pissed off about it.

I don't know why people are so upset about this. Go standardizes enough things about imports and package structure that you can completely solve dependency management in literally a shell script: https://github.com/holocm/golangvend (I'm using this productively for the Go apps that I develop at work).

this is being addressed in dep, it's obviously not fully ready yet but works pretty well in my experience

https://github.com/golang/dep

Glide is great - it supported the most important feature I cared about, which was aliasing for forks where I had to fix bugs. "Standard" matters less because there's also no centrally-controlled repository of packages, unlike npm/maven/pip