Certainly understandable -- I'd prefer to keep things simple and just have some kind of validation in place rather than rely on an abstraction if I can get away with it.

Having maintained various automation over the course of the past decade and a half, I can say things do change around. Over the course of only a few years though, obviously you can stick to some LTS release of whatever you're using and be pretty confident that e.g. "some-package" does not get renamed to "some-package-version" or split into "some-core" and "some-utils", or have a package get upgraded to a version with some less-than-backward-compatible configuration options, etc.