So tired of Homebrew messing up with my stuff

Pardon me while I’m venting out my frustration. I am so tired of Homebrew messing up with my stuff. It used to be the perfect tool for the right job until they decided to auto-brew-update-and-cleanup at every new install. Another day another issue, today with vim not running anymore:

dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/local/opt/lua/lib/liblua.5.3.dylib
Referenced from: /user/local/bin/vi
Reason: image not found

Lua has suddenly gone missing. Ah, but of course. I installed something with Homebrew this morning. The fix is to brew reinstall vim, which then leads to the following error:

Error: python@3.9 the bottle needs the Apple Command LIne Tools to be installed.
You can install them, if desired, with:
xcode-select --install

An xcode-select install and another brew reinstall later, vim is back home. It’s only a minor annoyance —only a few wasted minutes, but the point is, they didn’t need to be wasted. If you’re frequently installing stuff via Homebrew, this is quite a common, unpleasant occurrence (python virtual environments being hit with alarming frequency).

I know that one can disable automatic cleanups by setting the HOMEBREW_NO_INSTALL_CLEANUP environment variable. I will end up doing that out of frustration sooner or later. Again, the point is I should not need to do that. It all adds unnecessary friction, especially for someone who’s been religiously running manual cleanups (I concede that an un-maintained brew cache can grow to very sizable dimensions).

Homebrew is still an essential tool; just not so enjoyable anymore. It’s not like we have a valid alternative at hand, anyway.