I dunno about that. IME, python is much, much more universally installed on the hosts I've worked on. Sure, usually it's 2.7, but it's there! I've tended to work on rhel and debian hosts, with some fedora in the mix.
(Once had a coworker reject a PR I wrote because I included a bash builtin in a deployment script. He said that python is more likely to be installed than bash, so we should not use bash. These debates are funny sometimes.)
Interesting, in my experience perl ends up pulled in as a dependency for one thing or another most of the time, but I don't have that perception about Python. Maybe there's just something I use that pulls in perl without me realizing and it's biased my experience.
(Once had a coworker reject a PR I wrote because I included a bash builtin in a deployment script. He said that python is more likely to be installed than bash, so we should not use bash. These debates are funny sometimes.)