There is no ABI problem. The problem is a lack of standardization for important APIs and infrastructure. There once was a serious effort to solve this: the Linux Standard Base: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base Standardization would of course be the only way to fix this, instead of inventing even more packaging formats which fragment the ecosystem even more. LSB died due to lack of interest. I assume also because various industrial stakeholders are more interest in gaining a little bit of control over the ecosystem than in the overall success of Linux on the desktop. The other major problem is that it is no fun to maintain software, which leads to what was described as CADT: https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html As you see with Wayland and Rust rewrites CADT still continues today always justified with some bullshit arguments why the rewrites are really necessary.

Together this means that basically nobody implements applications anymore. For commercial applications that market is too fragmented and it is too much effort. Open-source applications need time to grow and if all the underpinnings get changed all the time, this is too frustrating. Only a few projects survive this, and even those struggle. For example GIMP took a decade to be ported from GTK 2 to 3.

Archive link for your CADT reference: https://archive.ph/t5m32

I wish websites weren't allowed to know what site a user is coming from.