When I first started using Linux 15 years ago (Ubuntu) , if there was some software you wanted that wasn’t in the distro’s repos you can probably bet that there was a PPA you could add to your system in order to get it.
Seems that nowadays this is basically dead. Some people provide appimage, snap or flatpak but these don’t integrate well into the system at all and don’t integrate with the system updater.
I use Spek for audio analysis and yesterday it told me I didn’t have permission to read a file, I a directory that I owned, that I definitely have permission to read. Took me ages to realise it was because Spek was a snap.
I get that these new package formats provide all the dependencies an app needs, but PPAs felt more centralised and integrated in terms of system updates and the system itself. Have they just fallen out of favour?
On the contrary AUR seems to have a lot more binary packages than source packages in my experience. Tons of package also have a “-bin” version (e.g. yay).
Your “unsupported” comment is a bit weird. It’s the AUR user community that supports Arch and makes AUR compatible with it. I don’t know why somebody would contemplate the other way around. I mean, it’s the while philosophy of the AUR.
I’ve been using it for the past 12 years and I rarely got any issues with it. I think you fear mongering quite a bit. Sure, you get over some abandoned packages from time to time and once in a blue moon you get a dependency that doesn’t install properly. When that happen you post a comment on the AUR or flag the package and it’s solved in a matter of days most of the time. It’s surprising that such a system would work so well, but it does.