Apparently there were two sets of tools and I never could find good documentation on the “modern tools” or make sense of the docs for the older tools.
I wonder if the station has gotten better.
Running sudo checkinstall after building with make does several things: 1. “Installs,” the compilation product 2. Packages it into a .deb that makes it easy to install anywhere 3. Allows you to use dpkg to uninstall a compiled project, e.g. “sudo apt-get uninstall ffmpeg-v4.5-source-aarch64-github” assuming the latter is what you named your package
Obviously this isn’t an end all be all, but is already saving me a lot of time