Really RHEL just leads you directly towards the correct conclusion (that Debian tries to talk you out of) — treat the distro system as a general starting point,

Really RHEL just leads you directly towards the correct conclusion (that Debian tries to talk you out of) — treat the distro system as a general starting point, and install everything directly relevant to your usage from upstream. Use the distro packages for native dependencies, not applications you really care about. Nonsense. I have yet to see a distro that could meet all the requirements for a non-trivial production deployment out-of-the-box. And I have seen all of the big names in production. When it comes down to the runtime environment then you're always rolling your own packages in one way or another, regardless of the underlying linux distro. The value of a linux distribution is not related to how it bundles the language runtime de jour. Those are inherently moving targets and no matter what distro you look at, they're always outdated and always wrongly packaged for your particular use-case. The value of a distro mostly stems from how it keeps all the other mundane maintenance and infrastructure headaches out of your face while you're busy keeping your runtime in shape. Praising RHEL/yum over apt in this context seems mildly hilarious.