Nix and Guix do pretty much that, at the core they are just some symlinks and environment variables. But unlike stow, they build all the rest of the package management and build infrastructure as well.
The big issue with stow is that you have to manually get the packages into DESTDIR and quite a lot of packages don't directly support that or do it in their own non-standard way, so there is far too much manual work involved getting anything installed from source. With Nix and Guix you can write a package definition once and than everybody can reuse that instead of reinventing the wheel.
The big issue with stow is that you have to manually get the packages into DESTDIR and quite a lot of packages don't directly support that or do it in their own non-standard way, so there is far too much manual work involved getting anything installed from source. With Nix and Guix you can write a package definition once and than everybody can reuse that instead of reinventing the wheel.