What I mean is that it's pretty SOP to have a package that installs a new command to work by installing to /opt/my-package and then symlinking /usr/bin/my-cmd to /opt/my-package/my-cmd.

In the absence of symlinks, that link would be hard and dpkg et. al would have to do package management by deleting the /usr/bin/my-cmd link and re-creating it instead of letting it ride, trusting that it will point to the correct thing when the update completes because the target bin will have changed.