alt Hacker Newslol... you really don't like it, do you. I used it for a couple of my projects, and I kinda agree with you. I didn't like it at all how it took over projects (you have to use a workspace).
For my small personal projects, eventually I ended up into reverting to just downloading the dependencies myself into a lib folder. A bit more work upfront, but simpler builds and you know what's going into your project.
I think it had its use and time, and it is good for the maintainers to mark it deprecated and time to move on.
Haha I really don’t, but I do get why others liked it, it was just never for me. I also forgot the intermediate step I took between git submodules and SPM where I did exactly what you did with manually adding deps to the project. Git submodules is it’s own frustrating hell lol…
More recently though the lack of maintenance of the CDN causing lots of problems not only publishing but even just pod installs failing was really frustrating, and as an SDK/framework maintainer just having to support multiple package managers was a huge pain in the ass. Especially with React Native requiring CocoaPods and having its own weird problems we have to solve in the pod file.
But yeah glad to see it being sunset now that there’s an officially sanctioned package manager. I know some people will complain that SPM isn’t as full featured as CocoaPods but I’ve found it gets the job done and the fact it’s both run off a simple Swift file and git tags and has official support from Apple is great. Kind of reminds me of Carthage for the modern age, in a good way.