I think that the "package explosion problem" actually does exist in C/C++ and Go but it's just hidden. Very often a project takes the form of various components, and you only depend on a subset of them. In these older-style languages these are all shipped as a single unit, but in newer languages these are shipped more explicitly so you can see what the shape of your dependency tree really looks like.

Boost is a great example of this, since it does a ton of different things, but the boundaries between components are not quite as obvious as having a "dependencies.lock" to look at. Tokio has a ton of different packages but often you only need a few of them.