Woodruff: Weird architectures weren't supported to begin with

Regarding (a):
Build systems are a clumsy mess (due to different requirements), so the only way forward is to 1) define a standard where and what language-specific things to resolve on download like Rusts Cargo.toml. In a language-agnostic way that somehow can be combined, when you use different languages.
Until then things needs to burn very hot until maintainers can meet and accept such a common standard to resolve dependencies, because there are significant economic interests involved in keeping build systems incompatible.

The alternative 2) is to make build systems so trivially simple that the build system is a binary (zig approach). You could then strip out the URLs as identifiers abit like mapping the internet (but for dependencies). This is like the complex version of 1) and more unrealistic due to the economic interests.

Any repackaging only complicates the picture, but they could ship the dependency file with whatever binaries or libs they ship.

Regarding (b): LLVM is a big dependency that simplifies and breaks alot stuff for language developers (you dont need to care about codegen, but alot about regressions and keeping the singificantly big LLVM API working). The problem will remain, unless we have a simpler language-agnostic alternative to LLVM. My hope is that somebody figures out the memory and execution model (of LLVM or C) and either an alternative pops up or LLVM gets forked to reduce complexity.