Removal of setuptools in 3.12 broke a ton of legacy builds. Basically created a wall of forced package upgrades for a huge amount of packages in PypI where end users have to bump a bunch of stuff if they want to migrate from < 3.12 to 3.12+
setuptools was never part of Python's standard library. I think you're thinking of distutils which was removed from Python in the 3.12 release. You can easily access distutils again by installing a package from PyPI.
This comment thread is a microcosm of the problems with python packaging :D I appreciate the work the ecosystem does on it and everyone is doing their best, but its still a hard problem that doesn't feel solved
