Yes. Since I first read the Google document that is now PEP 708, I have wanted to investigate if and how this proposal can be rewritten to accommodate for it, maybe take over some ideas from the file format suggested in the Google document. But I have not gotten to it yet.
Also this came back up, and I want to re-investigate it as well.
The proposal contains many links to use cases taken from questions I have seen on StackOverflow. But I do not know if it is a good enough way of measuring how often this proposal would be used if it were to be implemented.
For sure there are plenty rough corners in this first version, I would expect some compromises to be made to keep things approachable.
I see what you mean. My first reaction is that I feel like for this proposal to be useful it should target inexperienced Python users. I feel like more experienced users are able to setup other solutions for the targeted use cases (examples: setup a simpleindex, rebuild wheels, fork and fix a poorly packaged library). That is why I feel like a static configuration file is a better fit than a script. But I might be looking at this from the wrong angle.