Julia's package management was inspired by Cargo, afaik. What did you find off-putting about it, what would make it more Cargo-like? I've heard from people who are not used to the REPL wanting to do things from the shell directly, if that's the problem, there's the jlpkg tool [1].
The REPL was indeed part of my issue, though having tried again in the last couple of days following this post, my impression is much more positive than on my last check (around when v1.5 was new, I think).
Also, Pluto is a marvel - seems to fix all of my complaints about Jupyter and is trivially easy to use.
[1] https://github.com/fredrikekre/jlpkg