Thanks for the clarification Donald.
Given that the differentiation between distribution named after namespace packages and “normal” packages is already ruled out in private indexes regardless, there is no much point in keeping producing different files for them… If we drop it we can comply with the optimisations mentioned earlier.
I will go back and summarise these points in the setuptools issue I mentioned earlier. If anyone in the community would like to submit a PR I will try to review it (although specifically talking about .whl files, it might be implemented in pypa/wheel).