I've been reading gnome plant for a while and the recent blog posts about the move to gitlab and how gnome builder can just clone and build gnome apps are pretty promising, in terms of reducing friction.

Debian and distros in general should take note of that.

That said, I think distros (and debian) should look to provide a base system on which we can run flatpaks and containers.

The create a container with a low-friction programming language specific package manager for each project a developer is working on... and publish end-user apps as flatpaks, as these are the only thing people care to update anyways.