Agree, this only seems like a problem for the vast minority that are developing developer tools. And, to be honest, they got themselves in this situation due to a skill issue, too, Astral is just stomping the existing tools with better ergonomics and speed.
I'm not doing that but I'm not developing developer tooling either. I can go read mypy code though!
You can read uv code too. Rust isn't that hard to read a lot of the time
I haven't done much patching myself, but I've done it enough times to really appreciate having the capability when I do want to do it. It's one of the reasons why I have a huge preference for Python: its flexibility.
I've been doing it recently as part of diagnosing Pip's performance issues.