Where's the evidence that upstream cares? Many package maintainers are also upstream project maintainers or contributors at a minimum. I may be "just" a user but as a user of the unstable version of my particular OS I've submitted my fair share of bug reports, both to the package maintainer and upstream, and maybe I'm hitting some sort of lottery but more often than not, there's overlap. I guarantee you that GNOME Calculator's devs don't have a care in the world whether a metapackage in some distro that includes their software has a hard or soft dependency on Network Manager. There is no upstream for a metapackage.