Do you understand the reasons, and are you able to clearly articulate them? Are you able to describe the tangible benefits in the form of a set of falsifiable claims—without resorting to hand-waving or appeals to the perceived status quo or scoffing as if the reasons are self-evident and not in question or subject to scrutiny?
I'm not altogether surprised at the negative reaction to this comment, but I am at a loss to really get into the head of the reader who is so unhappy with it. Let's give it another shot:
You wrote—alluding to, but without actually stating—the reasons why registries and package managers for out-of-tree packages that subvert the base-level VCS were created:
> Yeah, people invented the concept of packages and package management because they couldn’t conceive of vendoring (which is weird considering basically all package managers make use of it themselves) and surely not because package management has actual benefits.
This is a sarcastic comment. It using irony to make the case that the aforementioned trio (packages, package managers, package registries), etc. were created for good reason (their "actual benefits").
Do you know what the reasons are? Can you reply here stating those reasons? Be explicit. Preferably, putting it into words in a way that can be tested (falsified)—like the way the claim, "We can reduce the size of our assets on $PROJECT_Z by storing the image data as PNG instead of raw bitmaps" is a claim that lends itself to being tested/falsified—and not just merely alluding to the good reasons for doing $X vs $Y.
What, specifically, are the reasons that make these out-of-tree, never-committed packages (and the associated infrastructure involving package registries, etc.) a good strategy? What problem does this solve? Again: please be specific. Can it be measured quantitatively?
