I don’t know if other distributions do this, but I quite like gentoo’s “world” file. Its a text file listing all the manually installed packages. Everything in the list is pinned in the dependency tree, and kept up to date when you “emerge update”. I constantly install random stuff for random projects then forget about it. The world list lets me easily do spring cleaning. I’ll scroll through the list, delete everything I don’t recognise and let the package manager auto remove unused stuff.

I think nix has something similar. I wish Debian/ubuntu had something like that - maybe it does - but I’ve never figured it out.