As I said, to me the whole thing looks like a giant log jam made of bad tools causing other bad tools and there is no simple way of cleaning up the landscape wi

As I said, to me the whole thing looks like a giant log jam made of bad tools causing other bad tools and there is no simple way of cleaning up the landscape without whipping out a chainsaw and breaking existing workflows and use cases first. However, if you are in the privileged position of being able to address every use case by compiling and/or cross-compiling from a nix or Guix setup for a project, I'd certainly go with that, too. The problem there is that this is likely never the case if you can't just containerize your application or prescribe which system it will run on -- which holds true for a lot of software.