Yes, and keeping up with these changes is a treadmill, for developers.

They also statically link binaries, though, and an old binary could be in production for a while if the product isn’t being worked on.

The popularity of Docker files shows another way of freezing dependencies.

The general principle here is that changes get tested during the release process. You’re not creating new combinations of dependencies and running them in production without testing.

(Well, within the same binary, at least. Servers talking to each other over the network may be unexpected combinations.)

But why should we take Google seriously as an example of good software development practice? For an organisation with effectively unlimited dev resources, it breaks things pretty often and kills off a lot of products outside of the star performers that support everything else. And thanks to the dominance of Chrome and Android, when Google does break things, the pain is shared by countless other developers as well. No-one can deny that Google has been a wildly successful business, but whether its current software development practices have anything to do with that or make it a worthy role model to emulate is a different matter.