Huh? The whole point of MacPorts is that it builds its own dependencies, thereby not touching the "system components" at all. It's entirely self-contained in /opt/local, or /Applications/MacPorts for GUI apps. I've been using it for many years and it's never broken anything. (Except occasionally itself.)
I would argue that you're far more likely to have stuff already installed in /usr/local than in /opt/local.
Homebrew is currently trendy but there was nothing wrong with MacPorts. Declaring the entire project to be "a terrible idea" is simply ignorant.
I've been using MacPorts for the better part of decade and some ports in it clobber system files without warning. I've been bitten one too many times by that
I would argue that you're far more likely to have stuff already installed in /usr/local than in /opt/local.
Homebrew is currently trendy but there was nothing wrong with MacPorts. Declaring the entire project to be "a terrible idea" is simply ignorant.