The sad fact is that a lot of software is difficult to compile; isn't documented well, something that is worse for building; won't work well if installed in a non-standard way, whether that is final location, different supporting libs, or different platform; and can take a long time.

So are you ready to deploy in prod a software that is so hard to compile?

I'm happy nowadays when I see there's a binary available, no mucking around with gcc/clang/llvm - just trying to work out which one, let alone which version! - no diving down a rabbit hole of compiling dependencies that then need other dependencies compiled… no deciphering Makefiles that were written in a way that only a C guru can grok, with no comments.

But that's my job, as SRE/DevOps/whatever new fancy name!

Whatever the benefits are, I prefer sanity.

Sanity of having a very old software, with backported features that are only on this distrib? I prefer to trust the engineers from the software that I deploy.