It's not really true to say "very little has been done." Thousands of person-hours have been invested into this problem! But the results have been mixed.
Time was spent, but on what? Creating 15+ different, competing tools? That won’t improve things. Blessing one tool and adopting something equivalent to node_modules could, but the core team is not interested in improving things this way.
At least uv is nice! https://docs.astral.sh/uv/