It's the pragmatic solution to a hard problem. Supporting distribution for all the different kinds of Linux package mangers alone isn't easy, and you take in h

It's the pragmatic solution to a hard problem. Supporting distribution for all the different kinds of Linux package mangers alone isn't easy, and you take in how macOS and Windows do things, I'm not even sure where you start. It's kind of sad, but there's multiple walled gardens in play here. I mean, Java's been around for 25 years, and it's just starting to get tooling for making OS installers for applications (jpackage). So, programming toolchains just invent package management that is easy for everyone to use. Everyone needs a problem solved today for multiple platforms, and it's not like OSes are working together to make this easy. Personally, I've come to prefer vendored dependencies with the sources, and building scripts around vendoring, separating the build from dependency distribution. But not a lot of programmers are comfortable with this. It's not a common practice, and the most popular version control system (git) isn't very great with binary management.