It is absolutely a compiler. I've certainly spent enough time waiting for it to compile! On the contrary, packing dependencies is a side effect rather than its primary purpose. (Your sarcastic last sentence doesn't help your point, even if you weren't wrong.)

However, it really is different from projects like this one, in that it doesn't attempt to obtain C-like speed (but does hope to do some optimisations). For example, x+=1 will still dynamically dispatch depending on the runtime type of x, and (if it's an int) do the normal Python arbitrary precision operation. But those will be called from machine code rather than interpreted byte code.

(Essentially, it unrolls the main loop of the CPython interpreter, which is written in C, for every byte code operation, and eliminates every case of the switch statement inside except the one that corresponds to this operation. That's what gets compiled.)