That really has nothing to do with language-specific versus distro packaging. If you replaced a bunch of rust crates with random modified builds from a third party, you would probably see the same types of breakage.
I wouldn't need to do that in Rust because Rust programs are typically statically compiled. If I install some third-party program, it doesn't break a bunch of software that I installed via `cargo install`, nor does it prevent me from `cargo install`ing new packages (whether or not I can install a given package doesn't depend on the state of the packages that are already installed on my system).
Maybe the real reason that distro package managers are unpleasant is that they opt to dynamically link everything by default?
This. Seriously if things weren't such a tangled mess. I could just do `apt install potato@v2.1` and life would just be so good and simple.
This is crucial for security. Otherwise backporting security fixes and/or rebuilding would become impossible.