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Knowing every transitive dependency in your application stack is totally unrealistic and is pretty much impossible for any modern commercial software outside of specialized/embedded systems.

Having knowledge of every dependency explicitly linked into your application is a basic tenet of software development that literally every software professional would endorse as a necessary best practice, but it's not what we're talking about here. I am 100% certain that every developer with a commercial Electron app is aware that they are relying on Electron as a dependency and Github as a trustworthy software vendor.



> outside of specialized/embedded systems.

I think you're conflating platforms and dependencies. The OS it runs on is a platform that the the user already trusts, left-pad is a dependency the developers are responsible for. There's some grey area like electron or the JVM but even there electron sticks out as a huge binary blob the user isn't explicitly asked to install.


I never brought up operating systems in the context of this discussion on dependencies. Electron is not an operating system, so I am not sure what your point is.




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