You don't need to know most of those things. Until last year I used setup.py and pip exclusively for twenty years, with a venv for each job at work. Wheels are simply prebuilt .zips. That's about an hour of learning more or less.

Now we have pyproject.toml and uv to learn. This is another hour or so of learning, but well worth it.

Astral is stepping up because no one else did. Guido never cared about packaging and that's why it has been the wild west until now.