Companies have got around this by only officially supporting one distro, like Steam with SteamOS (I think they also support Ubuntu). Steam also do static linking of the common libraries inside of ~/.local/share/Steam so that developers can be guaranteed to have something like zlib installed.

I think there is also an argument that linux distributions are converging due to systemd being ubiquitious. Although I personally don't enjoy using it and have substituted openrc on my Linux desktop, I can accept that developers can't reasonably support it and I would need to find a workaround to use their software.