> But if you want an existence proof: Maven. The Java library ecosystem has been going strong for 20 years, and during that time not once have we needed a lockfile. And we are pulling hundreds of libraries just to log two lines of text, so it is actively used at scale.
Maven and Java is simply broken when dealing with transitive dependencies.
I've been hit so many times with running time exception "MethodNotFound" cause two libraries have the same transitive dependency and one version gets picked over the other one.
It "can" be done. Some photons leaving the earth a thousand years ago. Bouncing off a mirror in some distant planet and allowing us to see two thousand years into the past