Not to mention being able to have reproducible builds for deployments, CI/CD, etc. The fact that the Python version is picked up from the project's package configuration is nice because then you don't have to remember to update the source build to match when you update pyproject.toml for a new Python release.
(And really, the experience of building Python from source on Mint was about as smooth as I could have ever hoped for.)
>when you update pyproject.toml for a new Python release.
? I don't upper-cap the Python version (or anything else without a well-defined reason - https://iscinumpy.dev/post/bound-version-constraints/ ) so I wouldn't be updating anyway. If I want to test under a new Python version then I need to write that out explicitly somewhere regardless; might as well do it on the command line.