Sorry to necro an old discussion, but I want to push back on this a bit and highlight what I think is the core of the persistent talking-past-each other that has been going on.
In my view the tag in git (or the same in whatever version control the project uses) is the “level 0” truth of what a version is, the sdist is the “level 1” truth of the release, and any binary artifacts (wheels, conda packages, deb, rpm, exe installers, …) are equivalent “level 2” truth of what the release is.
In this view “a way to build a wheel on platforms where wheels aren’t available” and “way to ship everything I expect a redistributor to need” are isomorphic to each other. It just happens the “redistributor” who builds the wheel is frequently the same person/process who makes the sdist, but I do not see how that is a material detail.
I think the answer to OP’s question is unequivocally “Yes”!