Isn't this the same kind of attitude around containers. "I don't want to think about or document the dependencies" lets just throw it all in a container full of crap that no one fully understands and it will "just work" because it worked for someone once before.

One of the things that I find very useful is to start from a base install of a particular OS and then be very meticulous about documenting each package I need to install to get software to build. You can even put this into the documentation and automate checking the dependencies are there with the system package manager. The dependencies and how you check them will be different across different distros and versions but at least you had an understanding at one point to work from if you need to figure it out going forward.