[Joel_Mckay]

With OSS, unless every add-on is part of the build tree or package repo testing... it quickly becomes broken as the ecosystem constantly evolves.

i.e. of the $3k of community Blender plugins/add-ons we evaluated last year, only around 60% are still functional in stable blender releases. Additionally, many built-in core features like Fracture became broken in 4.x due to API permutations, and getting split into its own module.

In a production environment one must version lock Blender for the project. =3

[const_cast]

IMO it's always a good idea to vendor software. But yes, OSS typically moves fast. It's a tradeoff.