I very much appreciate the sentiment - and agree that random crap (particularly some of the insane dependency chains that you get from NPM, but also Rust) in which you go to install a simple (at least you believe) package - and the Rust/NPM manager downloads several hundred dependencies.

But the problem with only using the OS package manager is that you then lock yourself out of the entire ecosystem of node, python, rust packages that have never been migrated to whatever operating system you are using - which might be very significant.

How do you feel about Nix? It feels like this is a nice half-way measure between reliable/reproducible builds, but without all of the Free For all where you are downloading who-knows-what-from-where onto your OS?