There are many solutions to the same problem.
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A rolling release distro suffers from that problem vastly less than a rolling release since you will usually have current versions of most tools if your distro has enough people to maintain it. See gentoo, funtoo, arch, manjaro, void.
Making it easy to produce alternative package repos goes a long way towards having people actually make them. See overlays in gentoo/funtoo and ppas in ubuntu and ubuntu based distros like mint. This is especially important in ubuntu which is not rolling and can be different degrees of out of date especially if you use the long term support versions.
Making it easy to produce a package goes a long way towards it being easy to make one even if its only used by yourself. Arch/Manjaro Funtoo/Gentoo packages are both very easy.
Gentoo/Funtoo use flags make it easy to build an alternative version of a package eliminating the need to build it because the distro maintainer didn't enable the feature you need.
Arch's AUR makes it easy to add a package that can also be produced from source and updated like any other package via aur helper. Can also have alternative builds of the same package.
Of many distros I have used over time I would say that on Arch and Funtoo I didn't have to build anything manually but I did rely on the AUR and overlays + made a package for funtoo which was very very easy.
On mint and ubuntu I ended up with about a million ppas + building some things.
On net I'd say that rolling release + a system where users can trivially create their own packages on something like the AUR is the most versatile while still being accessible. Funtoo was even more flexible but substantially more complicated.
However for various reasons I'm using Void now and have only 2 manually build things. Gargoyle because its not in the repo and I hadn't figured out how to make a package and mpv with a sndio partch.