I'm sorry -- you lost me at UNIX, LISP, The Web, Emacs, TeX. There is a reason UNIX and Linux is so fragmented - it was the thing that was churning for so long! In some respects, it continues to churn (I'm looking at you, Linus Torvalds).
I maintain a cross platform desktop app for Windows, macOS and Linux.
Windows is the best, 32 bit versions going back 15 years still work no issues. macOS is next, 32 bit don't no longer work, but 64 bit versions still work going back 5+ years. Ubuntu is by far the worst, some library I depend on changes it's API pretty much every year, and the old version is removed, breaking my app.
The solution appears to be Flatpak which bundle up the app with all it's required libraries. However I'm not sure how to make this work for plugins. Would each plugin need to be in it's own Flatpak? It's insane.