Well, traditionally, there was no Python/pip, JS/npm in Linux development, and for C/C++ development, the package manager approach worked surprisingly well for a long time.

However, there were version problems: some Linux distributions had only stable packages and therefore lacked the latest updates, and some had problems with multiple versions of the same library. This gave rise to the language-specific package managers. It solved one problem but created a ton of new ones.

Sometimes I wish we could just go back to system package managers, because at times, language-specific package managers do not even solve the version problem, which is their raison d'être.