the interesting thing here is that there are comments that say which concern depends on which.

Putting comments like these can be helpful, but it’s still set up for doing something sketchy, especially if you are new to the codebase. Being new and not being aware of all the “gotchas” a code has can certainly send you down the concern downward spiral.

The implicit dependencies between different versions of different services were not expressed anywhere, which led to various problems in building, continuous integration, and, notably, repeatable builds.

Often, such functions have in fact some hidden input which might be global variables, including the whole state of the system (time, free memory, …).

By default the current directory is used, but it's recommended to pass a value in your configuration. This makes your configuration independent from CWD (current working directory).

Secondly, whether this works is highly dependent on the module bundler. For example, in codesandbox, when bundling our app with Parcel (or Webpack or Rollup), this solution doesn’t work. However, when running this locally with Node.js and commonJS modules this workaround might work just fine.

manually specifying the order isn't really a great solution (as tempting as it sounds) because you'll probably have broken behaviour if you subsequently move away from Rollup.