I'm not saying you're wrong. I am saying that this is a new sentiment I've never heard expressed before. Perhaps Ubuntu's done something to make it flaky, but the upstream Debian apt tooling is famously stable and boring. I'm saying this very seriously: I don't recall a single time, ever, in about 30 years of using Debian-and-friends, that I've ever been bitten by a bug in apt-get or apt. I have also never been hit with a dependency bug when I wasn't using dodgy third-party package sources. In the many situations where I've deployed pure Debian (or pure Ubuntu) servers, `apt update && apt upgrade` has worked 100% of the time.

I do not claim that no one's had problems with this. The world's large. I'm certain there are people out there who have nothing but trouble with apt and friends. I do claim that I've never personally seen that our been in a conversation with people who have.