The alternative is to wait for the 10 different distros to all package your program and then update it once every blue moon.
No, the alternative is to package it yourself and offer it with a signing key. If you make a .deb and .rpm, you’ve covered a large majority of end users.
That sounds worse than the status quo, a lot of developers use Arch Linux, NixOS, other uncommon (to non-devs) distros.
Why is signing key with .deb/.rpm better than `curl | sh` from a HTTPS link on a domain owned by the author? .deb/.rpm also contain arbitrary shell commands.
If the shell script happens to have key verification built in to it, then not much from the perspective of provenance verification, but that’s rare IME. Also, using the OS’s package manager means that you can trivially uninstall it.