> Even if my product is fully open source and free to fork, it's my reputation on the line when things don't work as intended

I think that everyone who is worrying about that wants to apply corporate thinking on the open source model. Meaning they want to be a special thing where everything is supposed to be interchangeable. Just yesterday, I was compiling a program that hard depends on the GNU C library for just 2 functions and not even critical one. To be fair, the author said that they only test on Debian.

While the linux world may be fragmented, the true differences are mostly minimal (systemd vs other init system, glibc vs musl, networking manager,…) So it’s possible to decouple yourself from these concerns if you want to. But often the developer hard depends on decision made by their preferred distro team, and create a complicated build script that only works there.