What you call "dumpster fire", I call "steps towards uv", maybe even better tools in the future.
Most of the lessons that make uv good can be directly traced back to Cargo (which in turn can be traced back to Bundler). The main portions from the Python side that helped it have a good foundations were standards work (PEPs), none of which were driven by the people behind any of the three "major" package managers.
I'll never forget the day I discovered that pip didn't do any dependency resolution. You had one job, and yet...
Uv hasn't fixed all issues, but made it far less painful.