Though my approach is to fork and maintain the fork until my PR is accepted, merged, and in a tagged release.
Another is to apply a diff to the dependency within the build system, which is what I do a lot in Nix (mainly to solve cmake issues on hermetic builds).
Either way, it isn't unsurmountable. It doesn't really matter so much if it's used as an executable rather than as a library, though in the case of the latter it's really handy to be able to e.g. pass a custom spdlog sink for logging.
This alone is an important point to avoid dependencies, specially if you're anything like Bloomberg.