Comment by robotresearcher

The last-millennium solution to me-only installs is to put stuff in $HOME/bin, $HOME/lib, and $HOME/etc, and put those in the appropriate paths. Build the package with e.g. CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$HOME. At some point I switched to putting those dirs all in $HOME/opt for tidiness.

It's worked for me since workstations were shaped like pizza boxes.

I'm sure there are some things it can't do, but it goes a long way. When you're installing distributed binary packages you have less ability to control the baked-in install dirs, but if the package honors the conventional $(env) it can work.