Is having everything normalized in your system that worth it? I would say having (some) duplicates in your system is mostly fine, better that having some spooky-action-at-a-distance break things when you don't expect.
I expect the future is something like Windows's WinSxS, NixOS's /nix/store, pnpm's .pnpm-store where that deduping isn't "online" but it still is somewhat automated and hidden from you.
And if that's the future, then the future sucks. We can teach people to be smarter, but no, instead our software has to bend over backwards to blow smoke up our ass because grandma.
Is having everything normalized in your system that worth it? I would say having (some) duplicates in your system is mostly fine, better that having some spooky-action-at-a-distance break things when you don't expect.
I expect the future is something like Windows's WinSxS, NixOS's /nix/store, pnpm's .pnpm-store where that deduping isn't "online" but it still is somewhat automated and hidden from you.