For desktop/workstation users: the simple answer is just use the flatpak from Flathub or from some other source if you need a user package that doesn’t align to the ethos of your chosen distro. In most cases desktop Linux users have gone beyond self-packaging for specific library versions and just use a separate set of common libraries to power application needs beyond the out of box experience of any given distro. It’s part of why immutable distros are starting to take off and make more sense for desktop/workstation use-cases.

For servers, it’s in the nature to become part of the technical debt you are expected to maintain, and isn’t unique among RHEL, OpenSUSE Leap, Debian, Ubuntu, or any other flavor of distro being utilized.

If you’re not on RHEL-likes manually installing piles of out-of-tree software or randomly dumping RPMs into your system blindly hoping that things will “just work”, all is good on most rpm-based distros (RHEL, Fedora, AlmaLinux, OpenSUSE Leap, etc.). Updates don’t have issues and system upgrades (where possible) have had minimal problems within the past few years on all of my systems.