> Unlike a distro package you can also just -not- pipe it to the shell immediately and actually read it.
IDK about other distros, but for the one I use (ArchLinux) it's trivial to inspect the install script, and they (PKGBUILDs) are usually well structured and easy to read.
Unfortunately the majority of package managers are bloated and awful. Pacman/PKGBUILD and emerge/ebuilds are notable exceptions, though there is also Nix and many super simple based tarball systems that are also very good.
But all of that is irrelevant when 99% of the Linux world is running RPM/APT.
IDK about other distros, but for the one I use (ArchLinux) it's trivial to inspect the install script, and they (PKGBUILDs) are usually well structured and easy to read.