The lowest common denominator leads to working with Stone Age tools. I'm not surprised that not everyone goes that route.
And regarding your porting, Perl, sure, was easy to port. What about CPAN? Want to bet how many Perl libraries will keel over? Same thing for Ruby/gems, Python/pip, etc.
Don't get me wrong, your work is nice, but the people that build on top of your work outnumber you by 2-3-5 orders of magnitude and not all of their porting efforts will be trivial.
This was the extent of the changes necessary to get Meson working on the system-provided Python: https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/commit/85686e21d78a587de.... Surely that is not a "Stone Age tool"? The people doing the work right now to get foundational stuff working are doing that precisely to aid the porting efforts of the many, many developers that will depend on those things working in a few months when they have to port their own codebases.
And regarding your porting, Perl, sure, was easy to port. What about CPAN? Want to bet how many Perl libraries will keel over? Same thing for Ruby/gems, Python/pip, etc.
Don't get me wrong, your work is nice, but the people that build on top of your work outnumber you by 2-3-5 orders of magnitude and not all of their porting efforts will be trivial.