Another thing is that with package.json every dependency can say which versions of its dependencies it works with. This lets you update a dependency that is use

Another thing is that with package.json every dependency can say which versions of its dependencies it works with. This lets you update a dependency that is used by other dependencies and only have a single version (most up to date) of it. Some package managers also let you completely override a version that one of your dependencies uses, allowing you to force the use of a newer version. With Deno, both of these use cases seem way harder to satisfy. None of your dependencies can say "hey, I work with versions 1.1 to 1.3 of this dependency", instead they link to a hardcoded URL. The best chance of overriding or updating anything is if Deno supports a way to shim dependencies, but even then you might need to manually analyze your dependency tree and shim a whole bunch of URLs of the same library. On top of that, as soon as you update anything, your shims might be out of date and you need to go through the whole process again. To make the whole process easier, Deno could compare checksums of the dependencies it downloads and through that it could show you a list of URLs that all return the same library, but this would be like the reverse of package.json: instead of centrally managing your dependencies, you look at your dependencies after they have been imported and then try to make sense of it.