The thing is a huge pain to manage as a dependency, especially if you wander away from the official google-approved way of doing things. Protobuf went from a breeze to use to the single most common source of build issues in our cross-platform project the moment they added this dependency. It's so bad that many distros and package managers keep the pre-abseil version as a separate package, and many just prefer to get stuck with it rather than upgrade. Same with other google libraries that added abseil as a dependency, as far as I'm aware

I'd rather they just used the abseil headers they needed with the abseil license at the top than make it a build dependency.

The concept of a package is antithetical to C++ and no amount of tooling can fix that.

abseil is not header-only, though

I like abseil besides the compile times. Not having to specialize my own hash when using maps is nice.