In so far, distributions have ruled the roost in Linux world, and righty so because, linux systems are highly componentized, which is one of the reason for its growth, and so many different options available for one function e.g. mail reader, browser, you name it. So distributions served a good purpose of assembling this all together into something sane, and binary distributions did a good job at keeping users happy. However there is a shift in past 10-15 years where complex apps have started to appear, e.g. chromium browser, which are quite big and unwieldy in their builds etc. and have ton of dependencies, and they prefer to “vendor” these dependencies, which is understood from such large projects point of view is easy to test it as unit. So now we
are at a juncture where these apps have their own cadence e.g. chromium browser releases very frequently, and its internet facing so you absolutely want it to be safe, so now either we have large distro teams who are actively patching the dependencies that chromium needs or accept the chromium as a meta package. flatpaks and snaps have been some technologies trying to decouple OS from apps. Lets see where it all takes us.
A good discussion of the symptoms is here