Comment by physicsguy

That's not really true at all though, even in very complex software it's pretty rare to have more than ~10 external dependencies in a C++ project. People tend to roll their own a lot more, partly because dependency management is a lot more painful and fragmented. Boost is effectively an extended standard library, as is abseil, but the language has got much better at incorporating back features since C++ 2011, but even so, the dependencies tend to be slow moving and fairly stable.