What are you getting conflicts on? Unless you’re pulling from Sid, and did something fun like upgrading libc6, you shouldn’t see version conflicts if everything was installed via apt.
Debian does have Conflicts package metadata - https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.ht...
So in theory I don't like it, but I now better understand the possible reasons for it, and I haven't run into it recently
I think there is room for other systems that don't have this problem, but Debian is good at what it does, and you can build other things on top of it
What are you getting conflicts on? Unless you’re pulling from Sid, and did something fun like upgrading libc6, you shouldn’t see version conflicts if everything was installed via apt.