System-level package management is mostly an open-source-y phenomenon; it requires the maintainers of the package repository to be able to freely recompile ever

System-level package management is mostly an open-source-y phenomenon; it requires the maintainers of the package repository to be able to freely recompile everything from source (so that they can all use the same shared libraries). Over in Mac-land, the closest equivalent would be your OS updates (which ship the whole set of bits as a unit, and therefore not require much in terms of management). Things in the app store are apps, i.e. not libraries, and they all have to carry their dependencies with them in a larger app bundle, thereby trading disk space for much simpler package management. This is all separate from user-level package management (homebrew, nix, etc.), and project/application/source-level package management (what that article was actually talking about).