I do technical diligence on companies getting purchased or invested in, largely by private equity. Previous to that I was a developer for 15 years (still am, but open source now). One big one not touched on in the article is the cost of security updates. I see this all the time... companies that are in a bad position because they have too many dependencies and have wound up unable (for business reasons) to dedicate adequate resources to keeping them all current, and then end up with past EOL deps with published vulnerabilities. This – literally – costs them a lot at acquisition time. The purchaser (who is typically very risk averse) factors in all the cost to get things up to date and takes it off the price. This can be very significant. (looking at you, React et. al!)

On the other hand, I've seen companies where they used as little in deps as they could get away with, and they wind up in very strong positions. There really is a big labour cost in chasing the latest versions of underlying frameworks when those move too fast.