This used to be a big problem in the past compared to now, but the problem still exists because too many devs sadly can't seem to make anything without relying on external dependencies (or at the very least make static builds instead of dynamic).

But I find Devuan and all the other Debian-based distro's to be a massive disservice when it comes to packages.
Even now in 2023 it still comes with lots of software versions released in 2018~2020 (hell, Debian even ships the most broken version of i2pd I've ever experienced!), which might be a guarantee for stability on servers, but on desktops I think this is more a hassle than anything to the point you need to resort to workarounds like .deb packages or AppImages (which are glorified statically compiled binaries) or PPA repo's (which tend to not work or stop working completely sometimes) to basically achieve something a rolling release distro would do natively, so why not just use a rolling release distro right away then?