“Our Software Dependency Problem” is a great article going in-depth into the subject of the dependency management during software engineering.
Dependency managers have scaled this open-source code reuse model down: now, developers can share code at the granularity of individual functions of tens of lines. This is a major technical accomplishment. There are myriad available packages, and writing code can involve such a large number of them, but the commercial, legal, and reputational support mechanisms for trusting the code have not carried over. We are trusting more code with less justification for doing so.
Not only it nicely describes the problem in simple terms, but also provides practical examples and solutions to it. In particular, I enjoyed the section that suggests how to improve dependency evaluation in terms of design, code quality, testing, debugging, maintenance, usage, security, and licensing.