I think that it is true that I should have written this article or something like it years ago, but there's still a long tail of people who don't even know that invoking setup.py is bad, or that the goal is to get rid of all setup.py commands.

Probably the biggest stragglers will be build scripts, and as recently as mid-2020, the answer to "how do I build distributable artifacts without using setup.py" was still "you can do it but there's no good definitive answer": https://stackoverflow.com/q/58753970/467366

There's also been a lot of mixed messaging in this space, so I think there's a decent population of people who think that the way to stop invoking setup.py is to stop using setuptools entirely, mixing up "don't invoke setup.py" with "use a backend that doesn't have a setup.py".

But you are right to say that this has gotten a lot better over time and the word is slowly getting out.