This a not a unique problem to homebrew. Any pre-built binaries potentially shares this problem unless the build system the software use is intentionally writte

This a not a unique problem to homebrew. Any pre-built binaries potentially shares this problem unless the build system the software use is intentionally written to avoid this problems. Any package managers that is designed to not hard code the prefix, ie you can choose where the binaries go into, needs to handle this problem and have their own ways to deal with it. Conda for example has a long string of …placehold_placehold_… to facilitate editing the hardcoded path… Source distribution is more robust against this problem comparing to binary distribution. (But sometimes the authors of the software did not package them well and would have hardcoded some paths somewhere.) That’s why when you change the homebrew prefix, they will built from source instead, and it (using a different prefix) might not work.