distutils2 may have died. The idea of declarative package metadata hasn't (although it may not have advanced as quickly as you might like). There is a PEP[1] (which is sadly not yet implemented[2]) which a) starts to move some metadata into declarative format b) is designed to allow implementation of alternative build systems that have more declarative metadata.

[1] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0518/ [2] https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/3691