> I also tried having a meta-package, which has my “list of wanted packages” as dependencies, and then remove anything no required my it. Again, I needed extra scripts and complexity on top of the package manager itself.
I have a similar toolchain, fully using native system packages, built around Holo [1] as a config management tool and holo-build [2] as a distro-independent package building tool. In the intended state, the root configuration package (e.g. [3] for my desktop PC) is the only explicitly installed package on the system.
[1] https://holocm.org [2] https://github.com/holocm/holo-build [3] https://github.com/majewsky/system-configuration/blob/master...