> It's a critique of pretending that only some dependencies are dependencies.

Where exactly does this project pretend that some dependencies are not dependencies? I don't see anything like that in the blog post or the readme. In the readme I see some dependencies metioned, but it's not introduced as "here are all the dependencies", it's introduced under Requirements as "here are the commands you must run to set up your system".

If you open your distro package manager and look at the dependencies for an end-user app, it will not list header-only libraries. That's the same principle at work.