Comment by ogurechny

The choice is actually between dealing with complexity and shifting responsibility for that to someone else. The tools themselves (e.g. virtual environments) can be used for both. Either people responsible for packaging (authors, distribution maintainers, etc.) have some vague or precise understanding of how their code is used, on which systems, what are its dependencies (not mere names and versions, but functional blocks and their relative importance), when they might not be available, and which releases break which compatibility options, or they say “it builds for me with default settings, everything else is not my problem”.