A standard footprint might not make sense, but a standard format for distributing component pad placement definitely does. Most ECAD systems already have tools

A standard footprint might not make sense, but a standard format for distributing component pad placement definitely does. Most ECAD systems already have tools in place to generate proper landing pad offsets from footprint. And you're right that one can never fully trust downloaded libraries, but a lot of the issues could be mitigated if manufacturers distributed their own files. TI does this for most of their devices and it's a big draw for a lazy designer like me. I'm really surprised there isn't a better solution in the industry - building a library might not take as much time as the rest of electrical design work but it's still a large sink, to where many teams (even as small as 6 engineers or so) result to hiring a full time "librarian" to manage footprints and component libraries.