Historically it’s been months for many common 3rd party packages to become available. People have to decide when to adopt the new release based on their own requirements and dependencies. Usually few people running applications in production are in a hurry, and dependencies are a big part of the reason. (Another big part is the resources needed to test and migrate a production app – and the worry about bugs in any “point oh release”, which everybody would rather have someone else find first.)
Packages are a different matter. I’m all for encouraging package maintainers to be prepared and start working on wheels once rc1 is out. I’m unhappy about the pressure I am currently feeling to make it our fault if not every 3rd party package works on day one. I still feel that the Stable ABI is a solution largely in search of a problem, and too much of the argument in favor of it feels based in wishful thinking.
I wish we could look for a solution in the area of making the building of binary wheels easier, or faster, or cheaper. This could take the form of a build farm to which one can submit build requests, or simpler GitHub Actions recipes, or something else. (I’m not sure about the state of the art here, but I’m sure some folks will claim that conda-forge has solved this – however that probably doesn’t help the pip install foo crowd.)