As much I as agree with this, in order for your software to be included in a distribution it needs some initial traction. So you probably want to make it easy for early users to adopt it and to do that you probably want to release build artifacts instead of having each and every one of your users install e.g pandoc or sphinx to build the manual page for your application.
But once a few distributions have started shipping your software sure, it's the best.
But once a few distributions have started shipping your software sure, it's the best.