Watching language package managers reinvent everything distribution package managers have been doing since the 90s has been as fun as watching crypto people reinvent financial regulation.

The publishing topology is pretty fundamentally different: the entire power (and danger) of language package managers is that anybody can publish, not just a privileged few.

(This cuts both ways: I’d say that distribution package managers have learned valuable lessons about what users actually want from language package managers. Learning is a good thing.)

This comparison is tiresome. Distro package managers are curated, language package managers are not. They're serving completely different use cases; the former is the App Store, the latter is the web.