I encourage everyone to go evaluate building and submitting a package using the AUR vs Launchpad (PPA). I worked at Canonical and would never go back to Dpkg. I recommend users try it out themselves and see how much easier and cleaner the PKGBUILD approach is.

AUR does have a process to rate, flag and comment on packages. It is also much easier to review the installation script using PKGBUILD. There are a lot of high quality packages in the AUR but you should review everything you install unofficially, just like installing packages from a PPA.

Arch/Manjaro is often praised as simpler, more powerful etc., but there are also complaints about instability. Mint has several QA links: upstream, debian, Ubuntu, Mint. With Mint sanitizing the corporate influence, ie. snap being off by default. I don't need bleeding edge, just stable desktop. So I've found my optimum in Mint, though nothing is perfect.

Vendoring is shifting focus back to individual projects though. K8s could almost replace an OS in many regards. It is made to be modular, but only within its own framework. So it is changing the way software is run, similarly to initd and systemd. Such systems as we've seen, tend to "take over" and not be made to be part of and integrate well from inside an OS. Vendoring is really old practice, but also makes testing and support simpler for upstream. We all know the dynamic approach tend to be more unchanging, or associated with several circles of dependency hells.

It's just different end goals for software development and deployment, that affect how software is distributed. Kind of similar to touted goals of JEE of java fame, which also is too monolithic to integrate well within complex systems.