"Sherlocking" can be unfortunate for a developer, but it's odd to view it as an inherently bad thing. A package manager is a core OS feature, even Microsoft has WinGet now.
It has become a core OS feature. Historically, you see the set of core OS features expand tremendously. Back in the 80’s drawing lines and circles wasn’t even a core OS feature (not on many home computers, and certainly not on early PCs), bit-mapped fonts were third part add-ons for a while, vector-based fonts were an Adobe add-on (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Type_Manager), printer drivers were third party, etc.
I think that’s natural. As lower layers become commodities (try making money selling an OS that only manages memory and processes), OS sellers have to add higher layer stuff to their products to make money on them.
As to Sherlocking, big companies cannot do well there in the eyes of “the angry internet”:
- don’t release feature F: “They don’t even support F out of the box. On the competitor’s product, you get that for free”
- release a minimal implementation: “They have F, but it doesn’t do F1, F2, or F3”
- release a fairly full implementation: “Sherlocking!” and/or nitpicking about their engineering choices.
