If you build an application, The Right Way™ has always, and probably always will be a tarball. Leave to distributions the hassle to distribute your software.
This is absolutely not a solution. It more or less works for a few big widely used applications like Firefox & Libreoffice, but more niche applications can't realistically get someone in every major Linux distro interested in packaging them. And if someone does take an interest once, there's no guarantee they stay interested to package updates. Distro maintainers need to be highly trusted (give or take AUR), so it's not easy to add many more of them.
On top of that, some of the biggest Linux distros will only release application updates with their own OS releases, on a cadence of months or years. Software developers expect to be able to deliver updates in hours to days (at least in the consumer space - highly regulated things like banking are different).
There are good reasons why RedHat and Canonical, the companies behind some of the biggest Linux distros, are pushing app distribution systems (Flatpak & Snap) which aim to be cross-distro and have upstream developers directly involved in packaging. There are absolutely downsides to this approach as well, but it would be nice if we could stop pretending that traditional distro packaging is a marvellous system.
This is a complete and utter non-starter for most software developers.
On pretty much every other operating system out there, I as the application author have control over the release cadence of my software. On some platforms, I can simply release an installer and be done. On others, I send the app through some form of certification process, and when it's complete it appears on the App Store.
Linux is rather unique in that it has tasked the distro maintainers to be tastemakers and packagers of the software that appears in their repositories. They control what version is used, what libraries it's linked against and their specific versions, how often it's updated, which additional features are added or removed before distribution, et cetera.
From the outside, this is complete and utter insanity. In the old days, you had to either static link the universe and pray or create a third-party repository per specific distro. Thank goodness these days we have numerous ways to cut distros out of the loop - Docker, Flatpak, AppImage and of course Steam if you're a gamer.
