> and the per-language package managers has set the industry back several years in some areas IMHO

Curious, can you expand on this?

Python has what, half a dozen mostly incompatible package managers? Node? Ruby? All because they're too lazy, inexperienced or stubborn to write or automate RPM spec files, and/or Debian rules files.

To be fair, the UNIX wars probably inspired this in the first place - outside of SVR4 deriviatives, most commercial UNIX systems (HP-UX, AIX, Tru64) had their own packaging format. Even the gratis BSD systems all have their own variants of the same packaging system. This was the one thing that AT&T and Sun Solaris got right. Linux distros merely followed suit at the time - Redhat with RPM, Debian with DEB, and then Slackware and half a dozen other systems - thankfully we seem to have coalesced on RPM, DEB, Flatpak, Snap, Appimage etc... but yeah that's before you get to the language specific package management. It's a right mess, carried over from 90's UNIX "NIH" syndrome.