Yes, but you're jumping in the middle of it. A sane package repository won't disappear overnight, or ever. I can still install packages distributed with Debian

Yes, but you're jumping in the middle of it. A sane package repository won't disappear overnight, or ever. I can still install packages distributed with Debian Potato, the first ever Linux distro I used, which is now 15 years old. The code that I wrote against the libraries distributed with it will still compile, and had I only burnt stripped binaries to a CD back then, they would still runtime-link and run today on a brand-new install. And because it is all free software, the people and orgs who wrote those libraries, compiler, and standards, had given up their rights to force unpublication. In a sane package management system, and with version pinning on the consumer's side, your hissy fit would have had exactly zero effect. Assuming your package were free software, people could fork it, and still make improvements.