[oblvious-earth]

pip will not do that, it will attempt to use the latest version under the user requirements, only if there is a conflict between two packages will it backtrack on old versions of a package, uv does exactly the same.

Further, if a package index supports PEP 658 metadata, pip will use that to resolve and not download the entire wheel.

uv does the same but adds extra optimizations, both clever ones that pip should probably adopt, and ones which involve assumptions that don't strictly comply to the standards, which pip should probably not adopt.