On Mon, 6 Dec 2021, Jan-Erik Hägglöf wrote:

> Ok, so if I understand this correctly, you recommend install directly from ctan.
> 
> The question is, I’m not sure how, but is it the tds arcive?

Every package on CTAN is available as a TDS archive. For example, go to the tikz package on ctan: https://www.ctan.org/pkg/pgf and search for "TDS archive" to get a TDS-compliant zip.

Aditya