I don’t know if other distributions do this, but I quite like gentoo’s “world” file. Its a text file listing all the manually installed packages. Everything in the list is pinned in the dependency tree, and kept up to date when you “emerge update”. I constantly install random stuff for random projects then forget about it. The world list lets me easily do spring cleaning. I’ll scroll through the list, delete everything I don’t recognise and let the package manager auto remove unused stuff.
I think nix has something similar. I wish Debian/ubuntu had something like that - maybe it does - but I’ve never figured it out.
I think OSes really should take inspiration from the newest generation of programming languages here. Rust and Julia (as well as a few others) do a lot better than the OS. Features like environments (e.g. for installing per user packages), and a clean separation of a project and an environment would be very nice.
I hesitate to say it because it comes up in approximately every single conversation about package management, but... NixOS does all of those things. Whole list of packages in configuration.nix, whole of /etc encoded into configuration.nix, flakes let you pin everything, (therefore) it's trivial to check the whole OS config (packages, versions, configurations) into version control, home manager lets you do all this per-user (or you can do it in the system-wide configuration.nix if you really want), and you can drop a flake.nix+flake.lock in any project directory and scope things that way.
apt-mark showmanual shows you all manually installed packages and apt-mark auto marks stuff as automatically installed.
The list of manually installed packages is effectively the "world".
The new solver takes inspiration from apk in that it marks the world/manually installed packages the root of the dependency problem (hence why they can't be removed by the solver itself, only manually).
I think nix has something similar. I wish Debian/ubuntu had something like that - maybe it does - but I’ve never figured it out.