That’s where accountability comes in. It should be possible to have a non empty set of people that understand all the code. If I choose a dep to do unicode string parsing, that means I trust the author have good knowledge about unicode string parsing. And they should have the skills to maintain their code even if what I got is bytecoded or compiled.
What do you mean, you can't quote the Linux kernel by heart? I thought it was gospel for all nerds:
Loongarch kernel, first paragraph, the lord Linus said, in all his wisdom:
/* Hardware capabilities */
unsigned int elf_hwcap __read_mostly
EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL(elf_hwcap)
I'd much rather wade through AI slop than minified code, which may have previously been AI slop.