I think in most of my projects, many of the C++ packages I used for work (lots of computer vision, video codecs etc) I had to compile and host myself. The latest and greatest of OpenCV, dlib or e.g. gstreamer weren't available on the distros I was using (Ubuntu, Fedora, Centos). They'd lag a year or more behind sometimes. Some stuff was outright not available at all via package manager - in any version.

So, yes, you do have to figure out how to build and package these things by yourself very often. There are also no "leftpad" or similar packages in C. If you don't want to write something yourself.

In constrast - virtually every software package of any version is available to you in cargo or npm.