Comment by zahlman

It's not just about delays being "material"; waiting on the order of seconds for a venv creation (and knowing that this is because of pip bootstrapping itself, when it should just be able to install cross-environment instead of having to wait until 2022 for an ugly, limited hack to support that) is annoying.

But small efficiencies do matter; see e.g. https://danluu.com/productivity-velocity/.