These CLIs are just thin request clients a la curl. The code execution time is peanuts in comparison to the request latency

It's not negligible versus a single request. Even `gcloud --help` takes over a second on this machine - actually getting it to do a simple list request takes almost no time longer over any reasonable connection.

Plus Python is notoriously not easy to deploy for - a Go (or Rust or whatever) binary would have almost no dependencies to worry about.