I think a lot of it is things have shifted away from the raw language. Less and less you’re dealing with Python, and more an assortment of libraries or frameworks. Pandas, numpy, torch, fastapi, …, and a dozen others.

Packaging has been a nightmare. PyPI has had its challenges. Dependency management is vastly improved thanks to uv - recently, and with a graveyard of tools in its wake.

The modern Python script feels more like loosely combining a temperamental set of today’s latest library apis, and then dealing with the fallout. Sometimes parallels the Node experience.

I think an actual Python project - using only something remotely modern like 3.2+ standard library and maybe requests - is probably just as clean, resilient, and reliable as it ever was.

A lot of these things are and/or have been improving tremendously. But think to your point the language (or really the ecosystem) is scaling and evolving a ton and there’s growing pains.