Projects start because they scratch some personal itch, not usually because said dev has desire to become a packager or provide tech support to strangers. Even proper documentation is rare, much less proper packaging.
Preventing dependency hell via flatpak is one thing, but devs are even against nix which has mostly solved that problem - simply because it is not "their" build and so they don't want to spend time debugging. They just want to reduce variables before they offer support. That is fine, there are no SLAs here, so they are free to not-support whatever they want. Supporting users is already time consuming. But per open source code licenses, I am also free to ignore their wishes to not package some software. Anyway to get back to your example, I imagine esc [0] is the kind of tool that would be used among many packages, so maybe it would be worth packaging if it was still maintained upstream. It outputs a binary and should be amenable to packaging. But since it's been dead for years... maybe not worth. [0]: https://github.com/mjibson/esc
