I agree apt or dpkg ending up in a bad state would probably mean bricking for lots of people. It's something I remember also having to do in some cases after dist-upgrades.

I remember having occasionally dealt with having to manually run dpkg reconfigure to install packages that had somehow ended up in a semi-installed state during an upgrade, or some other similar bad state. To someone who's not familiar with the distro's internals, and probably to some who are, that would just appear as a mysteriously broken system that no longer operates.

I guess for me bricking would be if I can't get the system working again using some kinds of relatively well-documented or known repair steps (that is, known to me or sort of generally). I'm more bothered by something not quite working right and not understanding it than I'm by a complete but repairable bricking that I understand or know how to fix.

That's almost certainly not how most people would perceive it, though.

And even though I'm probably not that averse to fixing things, I also originally moved from Debian unstable to the newly founded Ubuntu because I didn't want to deal with routinely playing sysadmin on my personal box any more.

With that said, I don't know if it's because of stricter checks being made by dnf before package operations or what, but I've never got dnf/rpm into a non-working state on modern Fedora. Despite my old affection for Debian-based distros, I admit that apt/dpkg has seemed more flakey to me after this.

After nine years, I wouldn't even know how to try doing something similar to manually running dpkg reconfigure on Fedora. If that even exists.

(edit: sentence)