Just a hypothetical: given that pip is available with most Python distributions, if pip had a minimal, importable API, would this even be necessary? Could this use case be handled by something like:
#!/usr/bin/env python
# In order to run, this script needs the following 3rd party libraries
import pip
pip.install(["requests", "rich"])
import requests
from rich.pretty import pprint
...
And if so, would that be preferable to comments with side effects?