As someone who has spent the last 3 days resolving dependencies, I found your article especially interesting. I was building scripts that would allow the team of developers to transition to a different OS with minimal time and effort. It sounds just like a "dependency management engineer" job, I guess :) But I certainly wouldn't write off this time as wasted — learned a big chunk of info that would allow me to feel more confident and independent on this new platform. Quite a bonus!
As for the code simplicity, I think your approach is very mature and solid. Like a joke has it: expert developer says "this doesn't work, let me remove something"; novice developer says "this doesn't work, let me add something".
It's worth spending time to automate things. But this can look like the same overhead you were automating away. I've worked without an ORM, and I found it just meant I wasted my time implementing an ORM in my application code.
Small codebases are valuable. Delete code ruthlessly, and avoid languages that make you repeat yourself. But eschewing tools or libraries is the opposite of this.
As for the code simplicity, I think your approach is very mature and solid. Like a joke has it: expert developer says "this doesn't work, let me remove something"; novice developer says "this doesn't work, let me add something".
Cheers, oley