25 years ago I could tell you what version of every CPAN library was in use at my company (because I installed them). What version of what libraries are the devs I support using now? I couldn't begin to tell you. This makes devs happy but I think has harmed the industry in aggregate.
Because of containers, my company now can roll out deployments using well defined CI/CD scripts, where we can control installations to force usage of pass-through caches (GCP artifact registry). So it actually has that data you're talking about, but instead of living in one person's head it's stored in a database and accessable to everyone via an API.
Tried that. The devs revolted and said the whole point of containers was to escape the tyranny of ops. Management sided with them, so it's the wild west there.
Huh. I actually can understand devs not wanting to need permission to install libraries/versions, but with a pull-through cache there's no restrictions save for security vulnerabilities.
I think it actually winds up speeding up ci/cd docker builds, too.
