I have only seen this happen with packages that depend on non-julia libraries, such as ARPACK, but the move to providing binaries with BinaryBuilder should fix this.
BinaryBuilder/BinaryProvider are 100% functional and have been deployed and working for a long time now. The timeframes for individual packages to move to using them instead of ad-hoc build scripts, however, varies. It's generally very quick to do this, but complicated chains of binary dependencies can be a pain.