It is relatively recent (20 years) that an individual developer could control the machine they work on; and that 'production' machines have hundreds of dependen

It is relatively recent (20 years) that an individual developer could control the machine they work on; and that 'production' machines have hundreds of dependencies installed to support "your app". Until those numbers exploded, a script, a list of instructions, or something like kickstart worked fine. We have traded the complexity of writing code, for the complexity of managing how others code is installed and configured. A good trade off? Probably in aggregate, but not in the extreme (looking at you, node-js).