Like many things, I think it’s a balance and tradeoff. Here’s my perspective:
The idea behind CL bundles and mixer is that all associated and dependency software is packaged together, with the dependencies resolved at build time before it gets to user, so most don’t have to think about it. If there is packaged software which doesn’t work out of the box due to missing dependencies, I’d consider that a bug.
The autospec tool and output of packages here clearlinux-pkgs · GitHub is essentially a blueprint of those dependencies. For developers, they can leverage those blueprints and the idea should be to improve the automatic detection of a packages dependencies so it’s less of a task.
For debugging, there is a feature in CL that automatically pulls debuginfo data on-the-fly with a FUSE filesystem so the process is streamlined, since the need for those symbols in point-in-time. This is being improved overtime but some is avilable here How to use the online FUSE debug system - #4 by ahkok and here https://github.com/clearlinux/how-to-clear/blob/master/07-3-debugging.md