The important distinction is that self-contained doesn’t mean one binary that runs everywhere...does it?

A virtualenv still depends on the host interpreter and OS. These distributions pin the interpreter, standard library, and most runtime dependencies, but the remaining boundary is where production surprises happen:

- glibc version, CPU feature level, and third-party native extensions.

The musl builds remove libc dependencies, for example, but can’t load ordinary `.so` extensions.

I understand why it's important for uv to maintain this as it provides a reproducible Python base while making the platform-specific extension layer an explicit part of the deployment decision