Wheels have been a thing for a decade+. If not available from the developer the complexity doesn't reduce much.

That’s the really pointy end of packaging. Pillow (python +c+ External dlls) produces something like 50 wheels per release, and we’ve still got platforms where you’ve got to compile your own. Since they tend to be lower volume, they also tend to have more interesting compiler issues.

Yes, I'm using Python on an nVidia Jetson system with PyTorch, which depends on CUDA, and all my other dependencies are quite challenging to get working in concert. Every time pip3 starts compiling under the hood, I'm just praying that it will work.

That's exactly what conda/mamba/micromamba is covering: the whole toolchain.

I've used conda/mamba, but often ended up with broken installs (random coredumps) that were mysteriously fixed by just using pip3 instead.

That's what they attempt to cover, but they're not super successful at it.