It absolutely does not make it worse for general users in the process. The whole point is to help the user! I'm not saying there aren't problems on the distro side. Distributions like Debian do have the problem of moving much too slowly, and apt and the other "imperative" package managers are severely flawed, but the basic best practices I aligned make things better for all users.
And I'm not saying that you should never provide some prebuilt binary to your users if their distro is lagging behind. And if you really feel the need to bundle third-party libs then just make sure there are configure switches that can be flipped so that system libs are used instead. The best thing for users is for them to be able to get all of their software from their distro, and that requires distros and upstreams to each do their part.
And I'm not saying that you should never provide some prebuilt binary to your users if their distro is lagging behind. And if you really feel the need to bundle third-party libs then just make sure there are configure switches that can be flipped so that system libs are used instead. The best thing for users is for them to be able to get all of their software from their distro, and that requires distros and upstreams to each do their part.