It did, but CTAN was just a network of FTP mirrors. CPAN was that initially too, but quickly got supporting software to automatically download/update packages a

It did, but CTAN was just a network of FTP mirrors. CPAN was that initially too, but quickly got supporting software to automatically download/update packages and resolve dependencies, which AFAIK nobody else did at the time. Even Linux package managers didn't get that until a couple years later.