Yes that's a good point. I also have a dotfiles repo and I actually go one step further in that most things are organised into Ansible roles, for my laptop loca

Yes that's a good point. I also have a dotfiles repo and I actually go one step further in that most things are organised into Ansible roles, for my laptop locally and for remote machines if necessary. But as the other responses have suggested it's also to include times when using a dotfiles approach isn't possible or desired. Also, not that it's a day job thing for me, but it's handy being more portable across the Unices. I am especially interested in both NetBSD and OpenBSD (and most of my work colleagues develop on macOS). Some "newer" tools might of course be readily available in the base packages or ports but being able to use the defaults in Linux and other Unices is good. Of course there is still the different flag issue due to GNUisms vs everything else but then when you factor in a cloud virtual machine with might be running a different distro to you locally or container images that you may only use interactively, I think it ends up being easier and simpler to learn the defaults rather than having to deal with different package systems or manual compilation. Again this is how I work and is my opinion, nothing against these tools or the people using them.