So... you're suggesting startups should roll their own operating system before building their product?

Because I don't see any other way of interpreting your comment.

That was surely an example to illustrate how easily you can end up with 1,000 dependencies. Actual numbers vary of course, but the point that I got was about how dependencies spiral.

They do. Especially for web based applications built on frameworks and libraries that make it easy to pull in dependencies through package management. I used to work for a company that wrote a stack in Go with a TypeScript front end. When you compiled the whole thing there were easily 900 dependencies resolved, and 885 of those weren’t written internally.

An OS and its package manager are no different, but are a more accessible and less specific example to cite.

You should work in reading comprehension, try reading what's actually there instead of trying to find a hidden meaning