A hundred times this. When some library upgrade happened to break stuff on my system, I could roll it back selectively, while still getting the updates for everything else (as long as it does not strictly depend on this new library version). That's gone now.
What did you switch to? Fedora is switching to xdg-app, which basically does the same thing. Now that those two are using such an approach, I imagine that app developers are increasingly going to drop support for distros that don't use snap, xdg-app or docker. Snap/xdg-app/docker are a lot more convenient for those app developers.
Edit: forgot appc. Thank goodness they're all planning on supporting the Open Container Initiative.
Good thing I abandoned Ubuntu a long time ago.