Please pull over. I want off this ride.
Why the hell are we regressing to shipping around hackily built binaries?
But even if distros adopted some kind of half-rolling-release model so applications could be updated quicker, developers either have to manage N different packaging systems (apt, rpm, etc.) or rely on other people to deal with packaging for different distros, and lose control of a crucial part of their user experience.
Then there's dependencies. Linux distros go to one extreme (no bundling), while the popular approach to developing applications is to bundle most libraries so that you know exactly what version you're working with. There are arguments for both approaches, but it's another source of friction between developers and distros.
Distro packaging works for computational infrastructure that's widely used and not changing much, but it's a poor fit for what users and developers expect for actively developed end-user applications.
There's even a way to make an ebuild for nightlies, although you can get build breaks with those.
When I install software from a distro, it's been vetted and I can safely assume the software has a sane reproducible build process, or at a minimum, has had a sane reproducible build process added by the package maintainer.
If a new standard wants to solve that process, I'm all for it, but I demand reproducibility (or somebody to hold financially reaponsible, in the case of closed source)in my software builds.
Normal people just want to click a link and have their app install and run.
And that is true.
I like the approach taken by e.g. Nginx and MariaDB, where I add additional vendor repositories, but this workflow is probably neither user-friendly enough for my mom, nor have all vendors the resources to maintain several repositories for different distributions and their respective versions.
The "every application gets the same release cadence no matter what" approach appeals to me, and I'm a normal user.
I could be erroneously attributing the intended use case, but I believe this isn't designed for people who know what they're doing; it's for people who don't know, like grandma.
I would say that most things should use the old model, but there are scenarios where this could be preferred.
Building from source? Please try to imagine this from the point of view of users who aren't so technically expert as you are. They just want to, for example, run the latest version of VLC.
Something like this is probably more useful in the Linux desktop advocacy areas and not so much for hackers. Sometimes suspension of disbelief should be applied to projects like this, as it's target market is not hackers but instead helpful in converting desktop users.
That being said, I totally get why Apple, MS, et al are doing this. Unsavvy users installing random binaries causes no shortage of headaches or damage to your reputation. I just worry about the long term implications.