To be fair, getting all those scientific library binaries compiled and installed was a huge pain even before python came around. Python's toolchain made it better, but only marginally in some cases.
Sadly this isn't just the case for scientific Python. E.g. some widely-used web library (I forget which) recently switched to using a Rust implementation of TLS, and suddenly you needed a working Rust tool chain available to install it. This caused a lot of grief.
I love Python, and I've been experimenting with Rust and enjoying it so far, but this situation could have been better handled, I think.
I agree 100% about scientific Python though. It's a whole new level of horrible when it comes to dependency management.
