I get what you mean, especially regarding stuff like Python 2 vs 3 and the like. In that case it’s mostly an upstream issue. The Python devs disregarded this very important aspect and we’re stuck bearing with it.

Excepting those problem children, dependency hell is a solved problem. When people complain about it today I assume they either:

1. Are struggling with badly designed backwards/multi version compatibility of a specific library; OR
2. Never went through actual dependency hell, be it either early 00s Linux package managers or Windows DLLs. Then they see an easily solvable package conflict and think that is dependency hell.