This doesn't seem related to apt vs yum, rpm etc. but more to replacing essential dependencies by third-party versions. What happens if one uses the same kind of hacks on CentOS? Does it handle these better?
In my experience, RPM is a bit more resilient to this kind of stuff, because I've never had such a problem on SUSE or Fedora. CentOS is different, because tecnically you're not supposed to upgrade it to a newer version, so it has less chances to experience these issues.