I don’t think people consider things from a first principles perspective these days.
“…I can't see any valid use case for a machine-global pool of dependencies…” - Rhetorical question for OP but how do you run an operating system without having said operating systems dependencies available to everything else?
That quote is mine, so I think you’re meaning to address me?
> how do you run an operating system without having said operating systems dependencies available to everything else?
I’m not sure if I understand your question, but I’ll answer based on what I think you mean. The OS gets compiled into an artifact, so the dependencies aren’t available to the system itself unless they are explicitly added.
You asked what’s the point of a machine based global pool of dependencies - I answered: it’s an OS.
An OS isn’t a machine-global pool dependencies. Strange claim.