There are lots of other structures that work like this. Git is one - when git fetches a branch, git will check whether the remote branch includes all the commits it saw last time it fetched, or some are missing. (By default this is non-fatal but tends to produce warnings/errors when you try to actually use the replaced branch, but you can easily make this fatal.) Another good one is the style of Merkle trees used in Certificate Transparency: there's no proof-of-work, so the trees are small, but they still include a cryptographic hash of each previous tree so you can detect if something has gone missing.
The other relevant property of the blockchain is that it's not a reference to data elsewhere, it (like git) actually contains all the data that's ever been on the blockchain, and you need that data to verify the blockchain properly. This may or may not be what you want for a programming language package manager; it means that in order to set up a new development environment, you have to download every version npm package that ever existed. It does accomplish the goal of preventing things from being removed, but it's pretty heavy-weight.
