Since metacpan.org has been around, I've always hated search.cpan.org.
Case in point, at a previous employer, a contractor was tasked with integrating Jira with an existing hacked together monitoring system in order to 'automatically' create trouble tickets. Not hard to do, but the problem is he just googled 'perl soap' (since the jira api was SOAP). Which lead to a soap package on cpan.org, and it (the google index) didn't even show the latest version but a tarball version from 2001 (this was in 2012) which he installed manually.
Fast forward a few months and randomly the tickets that this perl script was creating in Jira were sometimes only have filled out and full of gibberish. It was quite the head scratcher to figure out, but in the process I noticed the super old SOAP package installed, I updated it via cpanm and all the problems went away. Apparently the old soap version didn't even have support for UTF8 and that was the issue (the script actually copied comments from employees in the other monitoring system and some new employees were given new laptops with Win8 that for what ever reason was sometimes using the UTF8 version of non breaking space chars...)
This doesn't sound like a reason to hate search.cpan.org.
To me, it sounds like your contractor was awfully lazy or underinformed. They didn't do the basic level of due diligence to determine if they had the most recent version of software -- nor were they even aware of the module installers. I don't use Python or Node.js all that much, but at least I'm aware of pip and npm.
Case in point, at a previous employer, a contractor was tasked with integrating Jira with an existing hacked together monitoring system in order to 'automatically' create trouble tickets. Not hard to do, but the problem is he just googled 'perl soap' (since the jira api was SOAP). Which lead to a soap package on cpan.org, and it (the google index) didn't even show the latest version but a tarball version from 2001 (this was in 2012) which he installed manually.
Fast forward a few months and randomly the tickets that this perl script was creating in Jira were sometimes only have filled out and full of gibberish. It was quite the head scratcher to figure out, but in the process I noticed the super old SOAP package installed, I updated it via cpanm and all the problems went away. Apparently the old soap version didn't even have support for UTF8 and that was the issue (the script actually copied comments from employees in the other monitoring system and some new employees were given new laptops with Win8 that for what ever reason was sometimes using the UTF8 version of non breaking space chars...)