Is yarn the better option? What is our path forward?
It simply don’t happen in Python, Go or Rust (or even Java) because the languages comes with a rich standard library. Javascript comes with just the basics, everything else is a dependency. It’s not uncommon for people to audit their dependencies in Python or Go, but you pull in maybe 10 or 20. A basic Javascript app easily pull in 100 times that, how are you suppose to deal with that?
This has not been my experience at all. Most Rust developers unfortunately seem quite happy to adopt modern programming bad practices. (There are many exceptions, of course.)
Example: I went with the first Rust program I could find installed on my computer, tealdeer. It's a dead simple program: run `tldr progname` and it will print a handful of examples of how to run `progname` in your terminal. Run `tldr --update` and it will download the latest version of the database containing these examples from a web server.
To build this extremely basic CLI program, I need ONE HUNDRED AND NINETEEN distinct crates.
Java has rich standard library. Some would say - too rich. But anyway - very few people would need customized collections, standard library covers all the needs. And where it does not cover all the needs, there are few commonly accepted additions like apache-commons or google guava. So that one solves `leftpad`-like issues.
Another difference is that Java is old. Most needs were covered by many libraries and few libraries survived which are good enough. It's again some commonly accepted wisdom, so you don't really need to search for many options. You have one good enough option that you'll use and move on.
So it's not about maven/gradle vs npm, it's more about ecosystems. I don't think that porting maven to JS world would change anything.
[1]: https://pnpm.io/