> But for us, independent developers of small programs, the problem is truly stark: we can't afford to build our programs for every distribution.

Most people use the major distributions like Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Arch, alpine linux, void linux,… A build machine with VMs can easily take care of those.

> And we can't afford to waste time navigating all the idiosyncrasies of various package repositories, both technical and political (not all repositories allow easy access).

Most (if not all) package managers allow for custom repositories. No need to get access to the official ones.