Agreed. It just seems far more pronounced in the Ruby ecosystem. My experience with Python and Java is that both communities are okay with maintaining multiple

Agreed. It just seems far more pronounced in the Ruby ecosystem. My experience with Python and Java is that both communities are okay with maintaining multiple versions of a library. And when you commit to that, you adopt practices like separate namespaces between major versions, which can make upgrading substantially easier. With a bit of trickery, you could even load two different versions of the same lib as long as their namespaces don't conflict. Ruby gems, on the whole, hardly ever employ namespacing so that option isn't even available. I don't see it so much as a technical limitation of Ruby, but simply the way the community has evolved. With other ecosystems, the emphasis is often on stability by sticking what's known to work. Abstractly they have the same dependency graph problems, but in practice their problems and solutions are quite different.