I think it's a natural outgrowth of what Linux is.
Linux is just a kernel - you need to ship your own userland with it. Therefore, early distros had to assemble an entire OS around this newfangled kernel from bits and pieces, and those bits and pieces needed a way to be installed and removed at will. Eventually this installation mechanism gets scope creep and and suddenly things like FreeCiv and XBill are distributed using the same underlying system that bash and cron use.
This system of distro packaging might be good as a selling point for a distro - so people can brag about their distro comes with 10,000 packages or whatever. That said, I can think of no other operating system out there where the happiest path of releasing software is to simply release a tarball of the source, hope a distro maintainer packages it for you, hope they do it properly, and hope that nobody runs into a bug due to a newer or older version of a dependency you didn't test against.
Yours is a philosophy I encounter more and more. Where there should be that unified platform, ideally fast moving, where software is only tested against $latest. Stability is a thing of the past. The important thing is more feature.
Instead of designing a solution and perfecting it overtime, it's endless tweaking where there's a new redesign every years. And you're supposed to use the exact computer as the Dev to get their code to work.
Linux is just a kernel - you need to ship your own userland with it. Therefore, early distros had to assemble an entire OS around this newfangled kernel from bits and pieces, and those bits and pieces needed a way to be installed and removed at will. Eventually this installation mechanism gets scope creep and and suddenly things like FreeCiv and XBill are distributed using the same underlying system that bash and cron use.
This system of distro packaging might be good as a selling point for a distro - so people can brag about their distro comes with 10,000 packages or whatever. That said, I can think of no other operating system out there where the happiest path of releasing software is to simply release a tarball of the source, hope a distro maintainer packages it for you, hope they do it properly, and hope that nobody runs into a bug due to a newer or older version of a dependency you didn't test against.