Almost every package manager on Linux distros allow you to install packages outside of the main repositories and still manage dependencies using the repos.
I agree there are a lot of distros to package for, but I'd say the bonus of not having to maintain and update all the dependencies outweighs that fact.
For example, there are a lot of tools that can generate Debian packages for you if you don't want to spend any time learning the manifests. I assume these exist for most distros.
Even if there are easy tools available, I'd still need to learn them for each distro I want to support. Heck, just figuring out the different names each distro uses for a particular package is a fair bit of work.
The discussion is about packaging your software for users, not yourself. Stow is a solution for managing non-packages software on your personal system, not for distributing it.
Most people don't package their software for distros.
Smart distros keep things close to upstream so the burden is small.
This is a weird argument.
Now you want each developer to manage dependency updates for their application? I don't trust them to develop their own app let alone apply security patches properly.
I agree there are a lot of distros to package for, but I'd say the bonus of not having to maintain and update all the dependencies outweighs that fact.
For example, there are a lot of tools that can generate Debian packages for you if you don't want to spend any time learning the manifests. I assume these exist for most distros.