IMHO there is no better package manager then homebrew on linux. It’s so flexible and so much less in your way. The only thing that suck, is that often something breaks when apple does a major release. So in this point i agree, I would love if Apple would directly ship it. But it’s understandable why they don’t, I guess.

I wonder whose decision it was back in the very early days of Mac OS X to not include a package manager—not even when Xcode first came out or with the Mac App Store.

I'm imaging now some grey bearded dev at Apple getting immediately shot down for suggesting they build the Mac App Store on an open package manager foundation.