Nothing of huge value is lost. Distributions play an important part, we shouldn't forget. They can maintain something like this for users, if so inclined.

This mostly hurts third party/ancient/naive packages that you probably, eventually, won't want to install on your distribution for other reasons.

This won't affect any packages natively provided by your distribution of choice. Think those random RPMs/DEBs you get from an external vendor -- UPS, keyboard, whatever.

They've had over a decade to see the writing on the wall, adding ~12 lines to their entire codebase/packaging spec. Probably a net-reduction given the NIH-syndrome of these scripts.

Instead, I've seen them make this directory, put their scripts inside, and just expect things to work out. It did, arguably by chance. The compatibility was deliberate, but support isn't forever.