They did and still do provide precompiled wheels for cryptography. The problem was the version of pip distributed by some of the major Linux distributions was t

They did and still do provide precompiled wheels for cryptography. The problem was the version of pip distributed by some of the major Linux distributions was too old to understand the newer tags that would have told them to use the wheels. Because of this I agree that they probably jumped the gun on making the switch but if you had a new enough pip you don’t need to compile it. On the plus side it gave the impetus for Python to define wheels for musl and other arch’s which is a nice outcome.