Honestly, I'm still incredibly shocked at just how bad Python is on this front.

I'm plenty familiar with packaging solutions that are painful to work with, but the state of python was shocking when I hopped back in because of the available ML tooling.

UV seems to be at least somewhat better, but damn - watching pip literally download 20+ 800MB torch wheels over and over trying to resolve deps only to waste 25GB of bandwidth and finally completely fail after taking nearly an hour was absolutely staggering.

Python was not taken seriously as something you actually shipped to non-devs. The solution was normally "install the correct version of Python on the host system". In the Linux world, this could be handled through Docker, pyenv. For Windows users, this meant installing a several GB distro and hoping it didn't conflict with what was already on the system.