I’ve run into apt asking me if I want to remove my entire desktop environment before, but very rarely did it leave things as broken as bad as what triggered the “do as I say” prompt.

Honestly, for Linux to gain any popularity, apt/dnf/pacman commands need to disappear from the Linux basics everyone needs to get through. We have had GUI package managers forever and they need to be more user friendly (and detect when you’re doing very stupid things with clear warnings, like “doing this will probably break your entire install” without expecting the end user to read a wall of cryptic text).

The trick to apt is to make sure nothing gets removed when you install stuff and only a few packages get removed if you uninstall stuff. Aptitude is better at listing the impact of what you’re doing and will suggest alternatives, but it can still use a GUI to make things clear for normal people.