Yes but I think it's still a significant issue for open sourced web applications -- there's still room for improvement. It's usually a lot of extra work to make deployment on new systems completely automated, so developers don't bother. For my last Django project, I have a Fabric script that will deploy an update to the server with one command -- that was worthwhile overhead to invest time into, since it will continue to save me time. But I had little incentive to spend time on automating the initial deployment, since it's something I'll probably only do once, so doing it piecemeal by hand wasn't much of a problem.
I've seen projects where this kind of environmental coupling led to the developer not even bothering to open source their work, since they knew it would take too much for others to use the code.
It's usually a lot of extra work to make deployment on new systems completely automated, so developers don't bother.
Deprec + Capistrano makes this very close to a reality for Rails. It has some niggles -- like installing virtually everything from tarballs when I would strongly prefer it apt-get everything so that I could get updates and so paths and configuration files jelled well with what Ubuntu expects -- but it has been, and continues, to be a lifesaver for me in getting new projects up to speed.
You can also do one step deploys and automate a lot of cruftiness. (I can do upwards of forty deploys to my staging server in a day when in development mode on Twilio integration -- which is hard to test without actually having an accessible HTTP server and making phones actually ring -- so I have a script which commits my changes, tags a new staging release, and pushes it to the staging server in one command.)
I've seen projects where this kind of environmental coupling led to the developer not even bothering to open source their work, since they knew it would take too much for others to use the code.