I still love aptitude TUI even though I don’t use Debian anymore.

Next is dnf because it’s clear with obvious subcommands.

Nala (an apt frontend) is the best I’ve seen so far

Aptitude

Nix with nix-output-monitor (nom). https://github.com/maralorn/nix-output-monitor

It shows the tree of packages to download and to build. It shortens the tree in realtime when packages have finished downloading/building and lengthens the tree when it finds more packages it needs to handle. Very fun and satisfying.

I haven’t seen this in other package managers.

Package managers are for chumps. Build everything from source and track where you installed it in a single master text file.