Why Python, tho, in that case? Its stdlib is quite robust. Surprisingly so in some areas.
I'm not saying that npm is doing everything right, but I suspect that beyond the obvious low-hanging fruit that we hear about pretty consistently with npm there's probably a long tail of less obvious stuff that can be exploited that will not be specific to npm. The fundamental problems with supply-chain vulnerabilities aren't going to go away if npm magically became pip or go modules overnight.
Python is the antistandard for package management. Or maybe even the eldritch horror of package management.
And IMO the complaints about Python packaging tooling are overblown. Setuptools on its own was a bit disappointing, but coming from PHP 20 years ago it was a revelation! Virtualenvs and requirements.txt were an further improvement and so was pip — in an era where most other scripting languages didn’t have pinning for sub dependencies either; but you could always “pip freeze” to capture everything.
Later on, pipenv wasn’t perfect, but it was enough. I never ran into any of the headaches people keep saying poetry and uv solve. Poetry on the other hand always gives me one reason or another to beat my head against a wall.
That said, I’ve never bothered to try to publish anything and can’t comment on that end of it.