I don't think it's so much how you (as an active developer does it) -- granted having to redistribute your app everytime any of (say) 10 bundled dependencies need an update is an inconvenience -- the biggest problem is when you have some old software (without vendor support) that is statically built with some overflow "built in" from an old version of a library.
Granted, at some point patches probably won't be backported, but it is convenient to be able to upgrade libssl, restart a few services and be done.
Of course, if you bought that software under GPL, you might be able to fix the issue yourself...