So how does that differ from either static linking or dynamic linking and providing the .so files combined with LD_PRELOAD startup script?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soname
Frankly this is not actually about libs, but about package manager dependencies.
DEBs and RPMs are overly rigid by design. Because of how they track packages, you can't have two versions of the same package name installed at the same time. If you want to have two versions of a lib installed, you have to rename one of them to avoid a name collision. Even though the files inside the packages would never overlap.