To be fair, that’s because Python packaging was “invented”/formalised a long time ago, before it was generally considered a bad idea. And a lot of the rationale

To be fair, that’s because Python packaging was “invented”/formalised a long time ago, before it was generally considered a bad idea. And a lot of the rationale for this was because you wanted to select specific dependencies for specific platforms, and there wasn’t a proper way to do this. But now, almost all packages are specified using plain text files. You still need to execute code to compile a sdist that has native code, but that’s a separate thing.