The main problem with the "distribution" idea is that people having core commit rights (or release leads) actively nuke any effort to get support for a package manager into core (Composer for example). Every major framework or CMS nowadays uses it to automate builds, tests and have a machine run deployment cycle. Just not WordPress. There are ways around this (see http://wecodemore.github.io/wpstarter/ ) but as all of this happens alongside core, there will be no high adoption rate in the near future and articles like this one will just describe what already happens behind the scenes and do not draft a real world scenario.