That's kind of the point on .deb not being the best format for distributing packages. Having it be treated by the OS as both an archive format and an applicatio

That's kind of the point on .deb not being the best format for distributing packages. Having it be treated by the OS as both an archive format and an application is unnecessarily confusing. MacOS applications are secretly just folders, but most users don't even know that. It might be obvious to someone like you or I, but most people don't want to do more than just click the app and type their password to launch/install it. I have more than a handful of gripes about Windows, but I can at least say that clicking an .exe has a very clearly defined and understandable behavior.