> They refused to invest in packaging to the extent that a separate company (astral) had to do it for them

uv didn't just happen in a vacuum, there has been lots of investment in the Python packaging ecosystem that has enabled it (and other tools) to try and improve the shortcomings of Python and packaging.

There's PEP 518 [1] for build requirements, PEP 600 [2] for manylinux wheels, PEP 621 [3] for pyproject.toml, PEP 656 [4] for musl wheels platform identifiers, PEP 723 [5] for inline script metadata.

Without all this uv wouldn't be a thing and we would be stuck with pip and setuptools or a bunch of more bandaid hacks on top making the whole thing brittle.

[1] https://peps.python.org/pep-0518/ [2] https://peps.python.org/pep-0600/ [3] https://peps.python.org/pep-0621/ [4] https://peps.python.org/pep-0654/ [5] https://peps.python.org/pep-0723/