no, from a distribution standpoint it's a pretty grave issue. As the name suggests distributions distribute, and if we start to unbundle the OS from the application layer, Debian loses the very thing people chose it for.
It's in a sense like a legacy carmaker or newsroom being more concerned with its own control than with the product. Doesn't end well over the long term.
I don't buy this. People don't choose Debian for the third party software in the repo. If they did, it's a bad choice.
People choose Debian as a rock solid and stable base OS, and it's perfectly rational to use it as a base for third party software on top from other sources.
It's an excellent choice. Debian provides about 60k software packages compared to say 15k in the Fedora repos. Debian and derivatives vastly outnumber other distributions in terms of available software, it's what drove Ubuntu's popularity, everything's available on it.
You can use it as a stable base OS, but it doesn't have any particular advantage, and even some disadvantages compared to RedHat or Suse distributions which offer you many more enterprise tools like Yast out of the box, package managers that are able to do atomic and reversible transactions, which apt still does not do, and so on.
I don't think I want Debian changing their packaging policies so some random Retroarch contributor can break my app (or worse, losing my data) by pushing a bad update. I want Debian to be a rock-solid OS where nothing breaks even if it means old software versions, because adults are doing QC.
If I need a specific app to always be up to date, I can get it from external sources on a case-by-case basis, such as downloading an AppImage/Flatpack from the developer's website or using Docker.
Why wouldn't you want a rolling distro if you want everything updated all the time?
It's in a sense like a legacy carmaker or newsroom being more concerned with its own control than with the product. Doesn't end well over the long term.