This seems like a roadblock that is rather inherent to the app container model of making images of host OS subsystems partitioned into their own namespaces.

I thought that the idiomatic usage was not to treat them as distros, but as immutable images that you simply tear down and provision when a major system state change transaction needs to be performed?

Package introspection and sharing seems like something people would run a CM or task runner on the containers for. Hence the whole move to build large orchestration suites for them.

Not sure what is exactly meant by "order dependence" in this context.

Package manager cruft is just bad resource management, or sometimes even deficiencies in the PM itself.