Fully agree. In good 'ol times, we had (and still can have!) GNU Autotools where the maintainer created distributions and the end user's (packager) system just needed to have rudimentary support for building programs from source (POSIX-compliant make, shell, compiler, linker etc.).

I know, speaking for GNU Autotools will get me downvotes and nasty comments, but there are many things the GNU Operating System got right and stable, mature distributions like Debian show still its heritage.