You do have the power. You can compile from source to any version you want. The caveat is that it breaks the primary reason most people use distributions—to get a set of packages that are consistent with each other.
Consistency is a non-issue for me. Reason I don't do it is because neither the update nor the uninstall experience are standardized and good.
I guess what I would really want is a) manually built packages install into opt and use a mechanism like update-alternatives to get things into PATH or wherever they need to be. b) Possibility to track an https endpoint for information about new releases. Could be something as simple as a text file of all versions with url of tarball and a flag for whether the version has known security issues.
No, that is not a relevant reason. There are people who have pinned their Windows versions, there are people who bypass Steam's autoupdates to run old versions of games, this is a general computing problem not a Linux problem. If you want to be particular about the version of something you're running you're not going to be able to rely on systems which were designed to remove that consideration from you, period. Nobody has ever promised that Linux or any other OS would just make all versions of everything work together all the time and you have the total freedom to pick anything with no consequences.
This is the opposite of a YotLD problem, it's because Linux users do not usually participate in automatic updates that they consider this a problem. Windows and macOS and Android and iOS are all automatically updated and nudge users into updating more frequently than automatically.
No, the point is that distro/repo model has a terrible user experience for installing applications. Sure, it works fine for the very narrow case of only wanting to install exactly what is in the repo, but the second you step outside of that everything gets needlessly complicated.
I, for one, am grateful that things like FlatPak and AppImage are finally gaining traction and I hope the trend continues.
I guess what I would really want is a) manually built packages install into opt and use a mechanism like update-alternatives to get things into PATH or wherever they need to be. b) Possibility to track an https endpoint for information about new releases. Could be something as simple as a text file of all versions with url of tarball and a flag for whether the version has known security issues.