If there's a lot of thankless, mundane work for the majority of projects that seems rather routine from what I've seen described thus far across multiple decades, so this seems quite ripe for some form of automation sans projects that seem to keep requiring changes constantly. C extensions, interop across languages, and ABI considerations are certainly much more complicated and require a lot of complicated work but given that 90% of the issues even power users run into are things like "the lxml library I installed won't get detected by package X when I run autoconf, please help."

There's nothing sustainable as an industry about something like software dependency management and versioning being so critical for things "just working" while people are sticking their heads in the sand saying "not my problem" as a rule. I'm so tired of solving the same problems that were already solved in the past because of developers wanting to work on "more interesting things" and doing the bare minimum to get stuff compiling and running again regardless of the package format. In fact, Docker may have made this situation even worse with so many Dockerfiles that will basically be unable to work. This is part of why I'm interested in the Nix ecosystem because there's so much work being done to make software installations repeatable and easier to manage. Unfortunately, it's squarely aimed at developers and is way, way too complex for most sysadmins to put the time into understanding, especially when they're so overwhelmed like everyone else with so many tasks.