Stale packages are a distro problem, not a platform one. You said so yourself, you can compile it and it works. Your problem isn’t with ARM. Arch on arm works fine.
It's just so much extra work, that I'd rather spend working on my project, and not compiling.
I love that we in Linux world have compiling as an option for most apps, but there is a time and place for it.
I feel like distros have an obligation to cross compile all packages for x86 and arm in their own build chains. That’s ultimately where this problem lies. You can’t apt install the dependencies you need to make install your thing.