When did you have to use cpan in a modern system? Compare that to how many times you had to use pip.
Now, if you use a crappy OS or distro (or god forbid, some container built by you have no idea who on top of nobody knows what) then yeah, you are bound to do the leg work yourself, but you will be doing that regardless of the language/subsystem you are trying to use in that case.
Not to mention that it is the only way to do things professionally. For example, if you must have a system that parses XML but for company policy is not allowed to have even the means of performing a network request. With python you either have both xml and an http library and whatever else included and you will either have to do a special package with a striped down python+xml only or get a corporate exception. While on other languages you can install only the xml parser component package and your code will run happily and be compliant with company policy.