Am I the only one that's sad that poetry happened before pdm otherwise we might have had pdm as a standard instead of uv, addressing many of the things uv addresses without all the extra bells and whistles that make it cumbersome. I don't like the wedding between package manager and install manager.
... but then again neither pdm nor uv would have happened without poetry.
I think in Python specifically, an install manager is absolutely the right call. There's far too much breakage between Python versions.
I recently had to downgrade one of our projects to 3.12 because of a dependency we needed. With uv, I can be sure that everybody will be running the project on 3.12, it just all happens automatically. Without uv, I'd get the inevitable "but your changes crashed the code, have you even tested them?"
How do extra bells and whistles bother you? You had the option to not use them. Like you said yourself, they’re “extra”.
What is the distinction between "package manager and install manager"?
One installs Python packages into a Python installation and the other manages Python installations.
Honestly I think poetry was a bigger development than uv. I used pipenv before it, and requirements before that, and I can't imagine going back. I've yet to fully embrace uv and migrate away from poetry for that reason (even thought it seems inevitable at this point, there's just no need)