Let’s count the various Linux flavors as different operating systems for this purpose, because they use wildly different package formats. And yes, I’ve installed software for fedora via flatpak that did not have packages for fedora at all or depended on versions of dependencies that the host system did not provide. (Specific python versions and dependencies IIRC)
Indeed. If you're an ISV packaging an application that uses OpenSSL, $DISTRO version N and $DISTRO version N+1 can easily be different OSes because they ship different incompatible OpenSSL versions, so what you do is provide a .deb/.rpm/.tar.gz that bundles a statically linked OpenSSL.