I'm with you on pretty much all of what you've said. The _trivial distribution story_ is part of the reason I handed off maintenance of tmuxinator and started working on rmuxinator (spiritual successor written in Rust).

Otherwise, I often find myself needing to deploy Python/Node/Ruby at $WORK and I'd really rather not try to get a bunch of dev/prod machines (possibly running different OSes!) trying to use whatever the flavor of the day for managing virtual environments, interpreter versions, packages, etc. is.