[wiredfool]

I'd have to look at numbers to be sure, but I think that the number of popular packages that include compiled libraries is dramatically higher than it was 10 years ago, and that's about when wheels were taking over. The Data/Science stack has really exploded in that time, and it's very heavily skewed towards packaging c/fortran/rust libraries. Previously there was PIL, some database drivers, and numpy was just getting started. I think more of the big packages were pure python. The earlier egg/easy_install/msi/exe installers have all faded away, and now it's really just wheels and sdists.

[andrewf]

What made it click for me is "Python packaging" means "how to install everything that I want to use from Python."

I wouldn't have considered "how to get BLAS onto a system" to be a "Python packaging" issue, but for people who want to rely on it via scipy/numpy/whatever, it is.