The Debian base system is much, much smaller. I'm surprised that people consider Python to be part of it. However, APT depends on Perl and the C++ run-time library, so those two languages have been part of the base system for a very long time.
Pardon?
$ file `which apt`
/usr/local/bin/apt: Python script, ASCII text executable? file `which apt`
/usr/bin/apt: ELF 64-bit LSB pie executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2, BuildID[sha1]=157631f2617f73dee730273c7c598fd4d17b7284, for GNU/Linux 3.2.0, stripped
You can of course add your own "apt" binary in /usr/local/bin/apt which can be written in any language you like, say COBOL, Java, Common Lisp or Python.
It looks like in trixie, it's libpam-modules that pulls in debconf, which is written in Perl. And libpam-modules is required by util-linux, which is Essential: yes.
I’ve notice a lot of that in base OS systems
Its a curiosity more than anything though