To be clear, the actual change in pip is trivial. It’s working out how to do it without causing huge breakage that’s hard.
This discussion is simply another iteration round the same question, and honestly, most of what’s coming up has been discussed before. That’s not to say the discussion isn’t useful, just that this isn’t a way of avoiding the work proposed in the pip issue, it’s just doing it (but on a volunteer basis, and without funding time from specialists like UX experts).