It also doesn't help that people keep using Python for tooling. Why would you want to insist on using a language that brings its own versioning problems and which will behave differently on each developer's computer? I've done embedded development for about a decade now (both as a hobby and professionally) and it is puzzling that people think it is okay to spend a week trying to make everyone's setup do the same thing on a project and then not see how this is a problem.
It is a problem. It is annoying. It does waste time. It is unnecessary.
Tools should be statically linked binaries. I don't care what language people use to write tools, be it Rust, Go, C, C++. I just wish people would stop prioritizing ad-hoc development and start to make robust tools that can be trusted to work the same way regardless of what's installed on your computer. Python doesn't do that. And it doesn't help that people get angry and defensive instead of taking this a bit more seriously.
That being said, things like PlatformIO are a step in the right direction. I know it is a Python project (and occasionally that turns out to be a problem, but less often that for other tools), but they have the right idea: toolchains have to be managed, SDKs have to be managed, libraries have to be managed, project configuration has to be simple, builds have to be reproducible and they have to be reproducible anywhere and anytime.
I wish more of the embedded industry would realize that it would be better to have some common efforts to structure things and not always invent their own stuff. I know a lot of people who work for some of the major MCU manufacturers and I am always disheartened when I talk to them because they tend to be very near-sighted: they are mostly busy trying to solve their own immediate problems and tend to not have a great deal of focus on developers' needs.