>in such an unusual and risky way

There is more risk in the shenanigans people who package software for distros do. Kdenlive suffered from big damage to their reputation due to all of the crashes packagers added by using incorrect versions of dependencies.

>"Normal" users wouldn't even encounter anything here, as they'd just install prebuilt binary packages with all of the dependencies already sorted out.

That's the benefit of just shipping what the developer released instead of swapping out dependencies under developers' feet.