Idk, I feel like we've been trained to believe this is necessary. Why you should need to know more about a dependency than its documented API? This sort of reminds me of Americans believing their current healthcare situation is the only way to do it even though it's awful.
Don't get me wrong - I don't think that you should go through it every time. Also, I'm not sure anyone reads the documented API of a dependency until some unexpected behaviour is happening.
My basic point is that the dependency hell is not the biggest barrier for an open source contribution. In fact, mixing both problems is a bit strange to me - codespaces is not going to magically solve the dependency hell - it's just going to shift it to some other part of the configuration.
The best way to start contributing to an OSS project is really be to have a mentor in project who could guide you through it during your first contribution. Personally, I'm willing to fight the machine for a couple of hours/days to get something to compile -- however, it's hard to justify reading code for weeks in the hope I can tackle an open issue.
Sometimes setup on different platforms is different in very subtle and hard to debug ways, and for smaller OSS projects that haven't yet been tested on different platforms, it may be very hard to figure that out. Now you can develop even on a chromebook (without the terminal access) without having to deal with any of that.
