You can really go down the rabbit hole trying to figure out where the wheel+Alpine problem should be fixed. https://github.com/pypa/packaging-problems/issues/69 is a newer bug that is tracking this. Python relies on the "manylinux" specification (https://github.com/pypa/manylinux) which originally pinned build environments to CentOS 5, was updated in 2018 to use CentOS 6, and then updated in 2019 to use CentOS 7.

It's entirely possible that the Alpine user base isn't as big/important as I would think but this seems like something that needs to be solved.