Python packaging and its tools

Note that npm does seem to have found a solution to the C extensions problem as well, since the old node-sass (which has now been replaced with dart-sass, but was quite popular before) was just bindings to the C libsass.
It used either prebuilt binaries or node-gyp to compile on the users machine at install time, and seeing how popular node-sass was/still is, that seems to have worked out.