Correction: much easier to maintain irresponsibly. That binary you just downloaded and stuck somewhere some time ago - when was the last time it was updated? What about all of its underlying bundled static libraries? How certain were you ever of their up-to-dateness? Did you ever check what version of zlib it was using?

Distributions attempting to package phantomjs properly had one hell of a time trying to reproduce its builds reliably. Most gave up.

Distribution from author as binaries is a whole bundle of fail from the get-go.