That is supported by most build systems, plain old make can do it, CMake can do it, scons can do it, the list goes on and it is actually not something special in software development. It's not like we were unable to build software consisting of multiple "packages" before catkin or bazel.
I'm not saying that these existing solutions are perfect and the problem in general (dependency hell) is pretty hard to tackle. It's just that I don't see how catkin and the workspace concept help here.
Btw. did you know that catkin_make, successor of rosmake, is already old-school?
It's now "catkin build" - oh no wait, that's again uncool if you go with ROS2, there we have our meta-meta-build system "ament".
#edit: I kid you not, it's now apparently "colcon".
See e.g. the discussion https://discourse.ros.org/t/colcon-amend-tools/4685 and rationalization http://design.ros2.org/articles/build_tool.html.
Workspaces are actually super useful. They're a similar idea to virtualenv and conda environments. If you don't find those useful I don't know what to tell you.
Since ROS2 is essentially a fresh restart I'm not surprised there's some churn. I think most people expect it to be fairly unstable for a while.
I've been working with ROS since nearly the beginning (as well as other middleware solutions) and I definitely see a lot of its flaws, but understand the rationale for a lot of the decisions. It's like C or C++, a 'worse-is-better' solution that's overall pretty decent, specially considering it's open source.
In my opinion this is no excuse. 10 years ago was 2008 and we had rock solid solutions to these problems - I don't think it was necessary to build custom solutions (and AFAIK catkin is already the successor of rosmake).
But rereading my top-level comment it does seem a little bit harsh, so I want to apologize and hopefully do not discourage ROS developers and the community. ROS is still useful and at least there is an organized effort to make an open-source robot software abstraction layer.
Remark that the robot community (especially in an industrial setting) is plagued with closed-source proprietary software that is even worse, so despite its flaws it's a step in the right direction.