It boils down to a lack-of-type-safety kind of bug.  It was comparing
'package-name with (package-name . "version string"), that always ends
up being nil.

Not sure about the change to `dependent-order', I'll have to think about
that in more detail tomorrow.  Perhaps there is an all-together shorter
patch?

> I see that you tested with an Emacs 30.0.50 build.  Could you test
> with 29.1, the version I'm using?
>
> Thanks,
> Adam
>
> 0: https://github.com/alphapapa/with-emacs.sh