It's not *that* bad. I mean, the need for such a tool. This is a way for the user to "correct" a maintainer decision to depend on this on that. Debian has the "equivs" program for that (which does essentially the same as fkdep, but fkdep is much cooler because of its rawness

In my Ubuntu days I used equivs to be able to remove plymouth.

Oh, and another anecdote: about 20 years ago I decided to give debian a go (being a hardcore Slackware user from day zero). I tried to install sendmail and postfix (I was a hardcore sendmail user but wanted to try postfix as well). I ended up with a half-broken system (you could not really have both installed even if technically this is no problem at all) so I remember me saying something like "How brainf*cked can one be to create this dependency mess". I left Debian and continued happily with Slackware. In 2010 I gave it a try again (first Ubuntu, then Debian) and it continues to hurt, but I've learned to live with it

(and don't get me started with SuSE, which I also tried in the early days.. it broke completely when migrating from libc5 to libc6!)