> rust+cargo ... seem to think it's "sexy" to declare war on the traditional
That's not true. They do solve different problems, both are related to packaging, but still tangential to each other. You can use npm, cargo, bundler to build software which you then wrap to RPM/DEB ... system packages. I can recommend the talk that Yehuda Katz held on packaging/package managers at the Rubyconf Portugal '16 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bwk8mdU6-ZY It's mostly about bundler and cargo and the design decisions behind them.
I'm not going to watch a 1 hour video just to "get" your point.
I am a package maintainer, and my actual experience is it's much harder to package software in these ecosystems. When I bring up issues, they get brushed aside as "that's not how things are done", ignoring the actual issues. This is "declaring war", no matter how you try to paint it.
Bundling is not packaging management, it's doing a disservice to your users. Bundled software is not maintained in the long run, no teams bundling software are tracking security and bug fixes for the full dependency tree. It's too costly to do this across all pieces of bundled software. That is why FOSS distributions put an emphasis on deduplication, proper API compatibility, and loose version constraints.
The package managers I mentioned take the opposite approach, of strict version constraints and little API compatibility. This makes things easier for the developers, but much harder for maintainers. Every new version we have to carry, simply because developers were too lazy to maintain API compatibility, means more work for maintainers to track bugfixes.
The original article is proposing a way to reward more maintainers. This is one way to put resources where they're needed. A better way is to arrange your system to not need so much resources. That is what FOSS distributions do.
That's not true. They do solve different problems, both are related to packaging, but still tangential to each other. You can use npm, cargo, bundler to build software which you then wrap to RPM/DEB ... system packages. I can recommend the talk that Yehuda Katz held on packaging/package managers at the Rubyconf Portugal '16 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bwk8mdU6-ZY It's mostly about bundler and cargo and the design decisions behind them.