None of that is "necessary". Rust doesn't have a BDFL and they've gotten along fine.

But I agree that the current situation is a mess. The "official" solutions are suboptimal and none of the unofficial solutions, which are pretty good, have enough clout to meaningfully simplify the ecosystem (held hostage by the majority of users with just pip).

So the ecosystem is kind of frozen in place. PyPA doesn't seem to have the will/capacity to do anything more than very small, incremental changes.