This seems to be a general problem for what I normally refer to orchestration software. I.e. calling a lot of external dependencies, io and in general very slim

This seems to be a general problem for what I normally refer to orchestration software. I.e. calling a lot of external dependencies, io and in general very slim on business logic. You've simply got to deal with too many dependencies, which may or may not have different versions, flavors and whatnot. It becomes impossible to test every permutation, so instead you rely on brute force to weed out bugs, simply fix the things once a bug report comes in. It helps having good integration/e2e tests, but they only go so far, customers/developers customize and mess up their systems all the time. Which is why I've choose binaries instead, they are mostly self-contained (except for various things about gnu and musl), and in general just rely on a higher level of built in functionality (because of the statically linked nature).