This is definitely true. You see it constantly in deep learning applications, where eg NVIDIA’s fancy fp8 stuff needs C++11 ABI, so they need to compile torch from source, which means everything with C++ dependencies on torch needs to be recompiled, and eventually it’s much easier to ship a container image. It can be done with an Ansible playbook, sure, if you don’t have to ever do anything else with your machine.
Isn't it also true that not every library needs to be deployed system-wide?
I find that many of these poorly maintained build systems have very little to do with native code. Often it is a node.js server + frontend or in the case of AI, python. Some of this seems related to the current norms in those ecosystems.
