I like nix and its approach but if I'm being honest I think its also getting easier to be sloppy about dependencies and ask AI to find any dependencies that might be missing from the cleanly installed packaging metadata. There's maybe a paradox for developers in that we can try to drop structure and brute force scan first intensively enough to catch anything likely to get caught or we can ask AI to finally apply all the rigorous methods we decided were too expensive for routine software and probably have minimally more things to run with each release.
I found that reducing my "Linux" lines from ~21000 (including net-pf-16-proto-21) down to those ~3000 I might actually use (e.g. udp_tunnel) to be a fairly effective method of not having to care about each and every newly discovered memory safety hazard.
There has been so much discussion about the increase of volume in CVEs. I love that it's super apparent from looking at that graph of CVEs by year, there is a noticeable bend in the slope upward in the 2026 plot. It's not just hype, the rate of CVEs is changing faster than prior years.