Who's updating their blog from a random machine without Python on it, though?

It's not python that's the dependency that needs managing. It's pip and the keystone cops it brings along.

I'd presume it's quite common with NixOS. At least I don't have python linked to my environment. It might be different would I use the REPL, but I do not, so for me python is a program (or script) dependency, not something I need to carry around. It's actually quite common for many setup scripts to fail when python is not installed, but not all of them list python as a dependency either.