These kind of complaints led me to try my hand at creating a new package manager for macOS[^1]. I really respect what the engineers at Chainguard have done with WolfiOS[^2] and tried to replicate the same - declarative package manifests which minimize the amount of dependencies. The project fizzled out after talking with some friends and realizing the futility when considering the global dominance of Homebrew.

[1]: https://github.com/willswire/cosmic

[2]: https://github.com/wolfi-dev