Every language community has its own priorities, and the package manager grows different traits to meet community needs. Those traits would come at a price, and different comunnities (and their package managers) would make different tradeoffs due to their different priorities. Python has a very involved history dealing with platform-native stuff, and provide a lot of convinience aroud specifying, providing, and obtaining those native stuff. But the complexity would leak into platform-agnostic packages, and gives an impression that packaging is worse when “all you want” is some .py scripts. JavaScript provides a much better interface for packaging and installation, but the expense is that native modules are much more difficult to package, and tend to fail spectacularly on installation when something does not work out. Many more things are like this from each side.

There are a lot of smart people working on these things in each ecosystem, and when you think some package manager is far surperior over others in every way, you are more than often simply wrong. Or saying it the other way (and paraphrasing a commenter from another thread), the only package manager you think is good is from the ecosystem you are not deeply familiar with.

>The only package manager you think is good is from the ecosystem

Or maybe, the only package manager you think is good is the one that has features you value and doesn't fail in ways you wouldn't expect?

For example, I have been trying to work with numpy and pandas a bit - two of the biggest Python libraries - and use them on my MacBook (itself a popular item). These installs fail, in the middle of an ungrokable stack of install logs. I have to shuffle thru useless messages to eventually track down the source, and then try to find a new compatible version. So sure, maybe there's native code in there, but I think claiming "useful summaries are not the package manager's job" is silly

But I also have had other terrible experiences: packaging is a bit overwrought; the terrible import/export/module system in Python means your dependency names have nothing to do with where you import from; SSL Certificate errors crop up at random on domains with valid certificate.

I am sure it's good enough to use, but I think it's a bit pie-in-the-sky to claim all package managers are good and you just have to be in the community. Shitty software exists