I'm a back-end dev, I've avoided being paid to do any front-end work (and/or my bosses have avoided paying me to do any front-end work? hahaha) for getting on a decade now. So no doubt front-end devs will cringe at what I'm about to say (not that I care!). But for the occasional personal front-end stuff that I still do, my "dependency management" is just "copy-paste versioned CDN script tags / CSS link-rel tags into my index.html file". Which is equivalent to (but better than) old-skool copy-pasting into a "vendor" directory" (which of course I also did, back in the day). And my "front-end build system" is just "write vanilla javascript in .js files and include it un-minified un-typescripted un-anything via script tags". I've got better things to do in my spare time, than deal with npm / gulp / yarn / whatever they've invented this week.