@wolf480pl @novenary @icedquinn They absolutely can.

In many distros if a library breaks applications, either said library doesn't gets stabilized, or it gets patched.
And when a new major API gets released the packagers can lend a hand to help, specially when it comes to testing things out.
(That said when choosing dependencies you should know about them, because they're a massive liability)

This is why distro devs typically have commits in a whole bunch of upstreams.