>(which it rarely is)

You're saying it's _rare_ for developers to want to advance a dependency past the ancient version contained in <whatever the oldest release they want to support> is?

Speaking for the robotics and ML space, that is simply the opposite of a true statement where I work.

Also doesn't your philosophy require me to figure out the packaging story for every separate distro, too? Do you just maintain multiple entirely separate dependency graphs, one for each distro? And then say to hell with Windows and Mac? I've never practiced this "just use the system package manager" mindset so I don't understand how this actually works in practice for cross-platform development.