You're definitely not alone. This situation is not new, and it isn't acceptable either.

The concept of `features` when using a crate is kinda cool as "you only download / compile what you use" *but* most of the crates are very badly designed, and also developers do not tend to reinvent a very tiny wheel when they can, but heavily depend of possibly dangerous crates to just serialize or deserialize a very simple data structure...

It's very annoying, as this increases the compilation time and introduces possible unsafe behavior in larger crates.