Packaging, and more importantly: package dependencies, are (imho) the essence of building a successful distro.

Get this wrong, stuff breaks regularly, and one ad-hoc fix follows another, forever.

Get this right, and everything Just Works™ (generally).

Debian is very good in this regard (along with the BSDs, I'd say).

Debian is very much one ad hoc fix after another, to an incredible degree really. Go dive into the source and patches and you’ll see how much duct tape there really is holding things together. What’s so great about Debian though is it effectively hides all that pain from you (most of the time).

Yeah, that's 90+% of what a Linux distro is, packaging software from a wide variety of projects and trying to make a coherent whole. In Windows/MacOS we have one company making the kernel, basic libraries, desktop manager and some applications, and separate independent software developers making and packaging their own applications (although that changed a bit in the last decade or so).