I dont like composer, am I a bad person?

your right eggbert,

there is risk of breakage but for instance :

bash-5.0$ du -sh  vendor
48M vendor
//thats one of my dev vendor files; admittedly it does have bootstrap IV scss in it.



I should be in Ghana if it were not for corvid 19 ; if 3rd world developers are taken into consideration then a lot rely on "pay as you go data"  from a usb dongle or equivalent. When and if  i go out there i'm not happy to turn a blind eye to vendor and eat 48 megabytes of data in one go to load local dev up to live server. I don't need duplication of everything  because i use rsync or Gsrync to backup everything .

Yes, but one of the benefits of composer is that you do NOT have to upload your vendor directory.  Run 'composer install' on the server, that way you are only moving a round a single composer.json file rather than a 48 MB directory.  Also, you shouldn't be commiting all those deps to your vcs either.  Composer actually is more efficient space wise as well.