All this, and yet package management is still so much better than managing software any other way, and there are continually real advancements both in foundations and in UX. It is indeed full of wicked problems in a way that suggests there can be no clear "endgame". But it's also a space where the tools and improvements to them regularly make huge positive differences in people's computing experiences.

The uneven terrain also makes package managers more interesting to compare to each other than many other kinds of software, imo.