Why did it take this long? Why did so many prior solutions ultimately fall flat after years and years of attempts? Was Python package/environment management such a hard problem that only VC money could have fixed it?
It didn't, though? Poetry was largely fine, it's just that uv is so much faster. I don't think uv is that much different from Poetry in the day-to-day dependency management, I'm sure there are some slight differences, but Poetry also brought all the modern stuff we expected out of a package manager.