They should give that to the meson author instead. He knows what he's doing and has a clue about C/C++.
Really, the whole distutils is a fancy way to produce a simple zip archive and put it in a well know location in site-packages.
meson has the build figured out, it's just a way of installing that archive with a bit of metadata.
> The Python Software Foundation is receiving $407,000 USD to support work on pip in 2020. Thank you to Mozilla (through its Mozilla Open Source Support Awards) and to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative for this funding!