> That feels like cargo-culting the toolchain instead of asking the uncomfortable question: why did it take a greenfield project to give Python the package manager behavior people clearly wanted for the last decade?

This feels like a very unfair take to me. Uv didn’t happen in isolation, and wasn’t the first alternative to pip. It’s built on a lot of hard work by the community to put the standards in place, through the PEP process, that make it possible.

What uv did was to bring it all together.

The point stands that it's less about the language than doing said hard work in any reasonable programming language.