Yes, but it’s only a viable option for the author of the package, not the person who’s suddenly failing to install it. And while everyone waits for the author to make a new release (which is hopefully compatible enough with the release users were using to do the upgrade…), they’ll come to your issue tracker to complain about it.
There are a few tricks you can use to have a wheel.bdist_wheel that just imports setuptools to get the implementation. Using any of them is a small price to pay for not upsetting users, in the overall scheme of things.