I see the appeal for the package manager for a lot of things, but space got so incredibly cheap and fast that duplication is way less of a deal than the effort to make stuff work the traditional way. But im not a real linux user. I don't like tinkering, I want to download something and it works. And the amazing thing is we can have both. If people like spending time to package something be my guest.

The funniest interaction I had recently. I downloaded a program that isn't in my package manager or had any sort of flatpack/appimage so I downloaded it as a deb and it didn't run because of some dependency. So I could clone the git and build it from source which might have worked, but I was too lazy to. So I just downloaded the windows exe and ran it through wine, which worked flawlessly.