There's a fair middle ground when the dependency in itself doesn't have dependencies, and is small enough with a permissive license such that the entirety of it

There's a fair middle ground when the dependency in itself doesn't have dependencies, and is small enough with a permissive license such that the entirety of its code can be dropped in to your project. Especially for very specific functionalities. I have used such tiny xml parsers, and I'm not affected by the fact that my copy is no longer the latest version. Its not so far from copying and pasting snippets of existing code.