apt-get solved this 'problem' like 25 years ago.
I hate package management so much. I hate installing unnecessary cruft to get a box with what I want on it.
It makes me pine for tarballs built on boxes w/ compilers installed and deployed directly onto the filesystem of the target machines.
Edit: I'd love to see package management abstracted to a set of interfaces so I could use my OS package manager for all of the bespoke package management that every programming language seems hell-bent on re-implementing.
These (typically) operating system repos have oversight and are tested to work within a set of versions. Repositories with public contribution and publishing don't have any compatibility guarantees, so the cruft described in the article must be kept indefinitely.
Unfortunately, I don't think abstracting those repositories to work within the OS package ecosystem would solve that problem and I suspect the package manager SAT solvers would have a hard time calculating dependencies.
re: interpreted languages, though, I think it's still a shit show. I don't want to run "composer" or "npm" or whatever the Ruby and Python equivalents are on my production environment. I just want packages analogous to binaries that I can cleanly deploy / remove with OS package management functionality.
You're effectively describing Gentoo.
Just a personal opinion but it's awesome.