Definitely. And the good ones are sometimes the most frustrating for their remaining imperfections! But when you compare them to package managemwmt efforts outside of Linux and free Unix distros, efforts like Homebrew or pip or NPM, there are typically lessons that Linux distro package managers have learned from each other that the others miss, to their detriment.

> for example pacman will happily break your system if you have any third party packages or don't use it exactly as prescribed.

If you care more about robustness than speed or simplicity, pacman is arguably the worst in its class. On a technical level it's still on a par with Homebrew or better, depending on what we're comparing. But it can be more painful to use in practice because of the actual role that the AUR plays in the Arch ecosystem. Arch devs' denialism about that has led to a permanent state of affairs where everyone uses the AUR and pacman ignores the dependencies of AUR packages every time it runs updates, i.e., perpetual breakage.

I'm not a fan of that design or the Arch 'blame the user for holding it wrong; after all we warned them this required manual attention' attitude. And there are better-engineered package managers available on macOS, too, like Nix and pkgsrc, too.

But the base system is still unpackaged (like in many Unix distros), and the package managers you end up needing for working on the OS are decidedly second class on the system and prone to being broken periodically by Apple. (If you follow along with Homebrew or Nixpkgs on GitHub, you can see the kinds of huge efforts they often have to go through when Apple releases a new macOS beta and it completely breaks things for them.) It's just too different to be summarized as a matter of 'like Linux but with a different GUI'.