Yes, Python’s packaging is partly bad because it’s based on C extensions, which are intrinsically bad, but it’s also just plain bad compared to its peers, like Ruby and NPM.
NPM also has support for C extensions, and they mostly work reliably (the only problems I've had are forgetting to `npm rebuild` when switching between node versions, or when switching between native mac builds and linux-in-docker builds.
In my personal experience, extensions written in C don't necessarily compile at first attempt because the dependency management there is even worse. May be it fails with a missing openssl or readline library and I have to go find whatever OS specific thingy I need to do to recover.
C/C++ have no equivalent of npm/bundler/pip. Instead there are incompatible flavors of Makefiles for incompatible C compilers. It's a hard problem space to work in.