[marcodiego]

Both flatpaks and snaps have been reasonably successful in distributing software in a cross distro way. Once apps reach any of these technologies they don't need to be in any specific distro repo. Snaps, for example, can update automatically silently in the background and it has been used at least by VSCode to bring updates to users.

Also consider that "stores" like ms/windows store, apple's app store, steam, google play store... are all mere glorified package managers which can update packages. Most used operating systems' these days offer such functionality. And yes, time has proven they are practical.