I have a few questions about this approach, cards on the table I mainly deal in C# where DI (through the framework) is the default. How do you manage the initialization of all of the dependencies? Do you need some sort of "root" where everything is initialized and passed in? That was all I could come up with while keeping it testable and that doesn't sound maintainable once you build up the number of dependencies.
I'm also a fan of the manual DI approach - I strongly dislike the magic.
I think it helps if you are building test/fakes of your deps that don't really need as many sub-dependencies. Generally you in a test `@BeforeAll` construct a bunch of objects or for a program you do it in `main`.
I did work on a project while I was at Google that was really big and a decade old that instead had a class with a bunch of lazy getters for each item in the dependency graph, then tests would override or reset the getters with testing versions as needed. It was a little clunky but I preferred that approach over the projects I worked on that used dagger.
If you've read through the Dagger dev-guide [0] there is *a lot* in there, while the manual approach it's usually just `new` which is a really simple concept on it's own :) I think this is the right tradeoff because reading code is harder than writing code, so it's worth the extra setup. In practice I haven't seen it to amount to be an overwhelming amount.
What dependencies are multiplying? I organize my code so that the very top level of the api has all external dependencies injected there, there is no public classes below a single exposed class that would need to be directly injected into. The only thing I need to actually inject are things that are outside of my memory space, ie network calls, event buses, dbs. If it's not using something outside of my memory space I am just using new inside my classes, it's far easier to test.
For example, if I'm adding a new feature to allow a user to change their address, I would have a single class at the top level "CustomerAddressChange" or whatever. I would inject an interface that wraps everything external, and that is the only thing that anything would be injected into. My tests would all stub only that interface. Everything else is done without any sort of DI container.