I think GP understands that and just disagrees with it. Brew looks pretty much like a package manager that has to handle binary distributions alongside ports-s

I think GP understands that and just disagrees with it. Brew looks pretty much like a package manager that has to handle binary distributions alongside ports-style source distributions across a range of OS versions and releases and two instruction sets needs to look. It’s a bigger problem than apt purports to solve, for example, more along the lines of FreeBSD with pkg/ports having to coexist via poudriere. But since nobody really has said why they think it’s ‘unhinged’ that’s just speculation ;)