Verbosity in Rust I think is natural because of what the language is trying to achieve. It's understandable that people would rather not bother with it and I definitely don't advocate everyone use Rust (and definitely not use Rust for all their projects). A lot of times it is because Rust isn't the right tool, but the article is just comparing languages and not really their uses.

If you build something in Rust and version lock like you would in any other package management system, why would you have issues with a dependency on something that is happily running and doing it's thing? If you must be on the latest version of everything, this is going to be problem in every language. I notice people tend to forget that not long ago everyone vendored their deps in Go for the same reasons and still do if stable is the ultimate goal. Save updating for when it's necessary, like security updates.

Be careful about just following the UUID anecdote. I actually did take a look at the commits for the Rust UUID crate. Frankly, it just seems to be popular and well maintained. Many commits are very small spelling and documentation updates. Rust has really great documentation features and the community is very good about leveraging those features. Go see for yourself.