You are right to be sceptical of “dependency bloat” - many many systems could be made simpler to debug and maintain if that advice was followed.

But: I urge you to give constraint solvers a try. This is something very different from some hipster ORM library. The good ones will be a single dependency containing extremely carefully optimised matrix math code that let you solve optimisation problems faster and with much more maintainable code.

Try some toy problem with the HiGHS solver for instance, it has good python bindings and even ships as a wasm package you can run in browsers. “Find the optimal times to run this heat pump given electricity prices”, “find the ideal train departure times that optimise for when people need to travel and minimises transfers”