Some time ago I started using distroboxes for most things. I have a distrobox with vscodium and Go installed, another distrobox for typesetting with TeX, another for a project that needed weird dependencies installed, etc. Most standalone GUI programs as flatpaks. The result is a Debian base that stays vanilla and predictable. The downside is having to keep the distroboxes updated individually. But upgrading the base system is never stressful.