Doing it like that has many advantages, like being able to verify hashes as small blocks are downloaded and not after downloading a huge file. Being able to de-duplicate data, being able to represent files, folders and any type of linked content-addressed data structure.
As long as your content is under 4MiB you can opt out of all this and have a content ID that is exactly the hash of the content.
1. if new packages are produced for a release of open source, could I see if there is a copy available via IPFS? No, because one can't predict how it would be chunked. So, one would have to download and then derive a content ID and one can only tell if it is available if the same chunking algorithm is available.
2. if I want to push a package or other binary, can I figure out if it is already available via IPFS? No, one can't.