I don't think anyone is saying that you should depend on stale dependencies. You should not hand off your responsiblity to untrustworthy package managements services though. Evidence of the failure of automated package management is the near constant shai-hulud attacks as well as the originating post here.

The fact is that your dependencies are your responsibility. You should be staying up to date on what you depend on and their vulnerabilities. Most vulnerabilities affect specific code paths which may not be present in your code base and do not require mitigation. These are decisions you can make by understanding what your dependencies are instead of offloading to automated package management systems.

NPM has been the posterchild of these types of issues but the dependency stack I saw everytime I compiled even simple programs in Rust made me think Rust would be impacted next. Personally I think third party modules that are effectively universally used (axum, tokio, serde) should be integrated directly into the language.