Software should be written robustly, and libraries shouldn't keep changing their APIs and ABIs. It's a shame some people who call themselves developers have forgotten that. Also you're assuming that distro packagers don't care, which is certainly not true. We are then ones who get to triage the bugs.
They should, but the world isn't perfect and occasionally you do actually need to apply workarounds (which application developers also dislike having to deal with, but it's better than just leaving bugs in). Distros would run screaming from the bare metal embedded world where it's quite common to take a dependency and mostly rewrite it to suit your own needs.
And I'm not saying distro maintainers don't care, I'm just saying they frequently don't have the resources to package some applications correctly and test them as thoroughly, especially when they're deviating in terms of dependencies from what upstream is working with. And much as the fallout from that should land on the distro maintainer's plate, it a) inevitably affects users when bugs appear in this process, and b) increases workload for upstream because users don't necessarily understand the correct place to report bugs.
