Yes my previous is mainly with FreeBSD. Your response highlights my mistake. As a Guix noob (but with decades of apt/yum/rpm/pkg kinda experience) I misunderstood how these things interact, and failing to manage Guix was most definitely my fault.

Don't get me wrong, I love Guix and the philosophy, but my heart cries out for some Grand Unified Manager of Packages (GUMP), something that can track whether things need building from source, or can be brought in as binary from an apt or rpm, or build those packages as intermediate stages. I kinda thought that's what Guix was going to do. Now I see that a unified package manager is probably unreasonable and that we are headed more toward containerised "Snap/flatpck" way of things - which I don't like.