Python package management was notoriously awful. The problem wasn't that people were trying to do things better, it was that they weren't; every new Python dependency management tool just repeated the mistakes of all the previous Python dependency management tools. uv is the first one to break the cycle (and it's probably not a coincidence that it's the first one to not be written in Python).
Poetry broke the cycle. Unified toolchain, lock file, single configuration file, full dependency graph, dev dependencies. uv is faster which is great but Poetry was a huge step in the right direction and still a good tool.
