One of the Loki maintainers here (though I mostly work on other stuff now). I promise it's not difficult on purpose.
We've put a lot of effort into optimizing the Kubernetes experience that non-containerized installations haven't been getting as much attention. We'd be thrilled to have system packages for Loki that also set it up as a service, it's just not something we've been able to spend time doing ourselves yet.
Grafana Labs employee here. We've been using jsonnet-bundler as a package manager on top of our Tanka configs. As for some common packages, we open source most of ours[1]. We also provide Tanka-compatible configs for Loki[2].