I can report the opposite - I've had to assist a fedora user when yum/rpm left them in a state that prevented a ton of new packages from being installed due to an interaction between the official fedora repos and rpm fusion, the repo everyone tells you to add to fedora to get video drivers and codecs etc. It was actually quite complicated to resolve as packages relying on specific libraries that were being held back had to be identified, removed, external repo removed, libs updated, packages readded, repo readded.

All it took to get him in that state was copying a pasting a few lines thats suggested on every fedora forum, and a few unwise version dependencies in some official packages, and an external repo that falls behind the official one a fair amount.

That is not a description of a well working system. And casuals frequently end up with tons of held back packages with apt because of not using dist-upgrade.

I'm a heavy linux user and happily deploy it all the time, but to suggest that current package management needs no improvement is insanity. It's a highly advanced system of bandaids for decades worth of iterative engineering on a core design that predated shared libraries, CVE's and when update cycles were well longer than a year.

A clean slate design would be an infinite improvement - it's just a crazy difficult problem without it basically being a new platform and requiring modifications to the 3rd party code that you're installing.