I’d love to see something like that applied to a project like Debian. The tools already exist. The cost of switching is too great, and you’d need everyone to learn your new system before you’d see the benefit.

I wrote a bit about this here: https://blog.williammanley.net/2020/05/25/unlock-software-fr...

I understand that nix have made some progress in this direction, but I don’t know any more than that.