I can only speak for myself but I don't think you've got the cause and effect right. Dependences tend to have their own dependencies (which have ...). It's not

I can only speak for myself but I don't think you've got the cause and effect right. Dependences tend to have their own dependencies (which have ...). It's not so much the difficulty as it is the awareness of it that leads me to minimize my dependencies to the bare minimum. All my dependencies are locally cloned. I build them from source in a network isolated environment. And yeah, that makes it more expensive to bring new ones in so I tend to shy away from it. I see that as a good thing. That said, if you're willing to give cmake access to the network things largely just work as long as you don't attempt anything too exotic compared to the original authors. For that matter boost already has a decent solution for pretty much anything and is available from your distros repos. Rolling your own is very much a cultural past time as opposed to a technical necessity.