I largely agree but don't want to entirely discount the effect that using a compiled language had.

At least in my limited experience, the selling point with the most traction is that you don't already need a working python install to get UV. And once you have UV, you can just go!

If I had a dollar for every time I've helped somebody untangle the mess of python environment libraries created by an undocumented mix of python delivered through the distributions package management versus native pip versus manually installed...

At least on paper, both poetry and UV have a pretty similar feature set. You do however need a working python environment to install and use poetry though.

So basically, it avoids the whole chicken-and-egg problem. With UV you've simply always got "UV -> project Python 1.23 -> project". UV is your dependency manager, and your Python is just another dependency.

With other dependency managers you end up with "system Python 3.45 -> dep manager -> project Python 1.23 -> project". Or worse, "system Python 1.23 -> dep manager -> project Python 1.23 -> project". And of course there will be people who read about the problem and install their own Python manager, so they end up with a "system Python -> virtualenv Python -> poetry Python -> project" stack. Or the other way around, and they'll end up installing their project dependencies globally...

1000% this. uv is trivially installable and is completely unrelated to installations of python.