It is more about being lazy.
In most cases, where you havn’t destroyed your filesystem, you can just boot another Linux from a USB stick, mount your filesystems to /mnt, chroot into it, and then investigate and fix there.
See the Archlinux wiki, even if you do not use Archlinux, it is great: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Chroot
No no no! When you break something in Linux systems you fix it. Starting over and reinstalling everything is what you do when you mess up on Windows.
I found the main issue with many non-rolling release distributions are the upgrade instructions from one stable release to the next, and not the difficulty of installing them.
I’m myself a Archlinux guy, but that does sometimes require some carefulness and regularly (at least weekly) applying updates and does not have stable automatic updates, so I started installing Fedora atomic desktop distributions (Fedora Silverblue/Kinolite/etc.) for people that just want to use their device for basic stuff.
The reason for that is long term maintainability without an expert at hand.
I had so many bad experiences updating distributions from one stable version to the next, be it Debian and Ubuntu-based, or Fedora-based distributions.
And with those atomic desktop distributions the amount of moving parts is much lower, so hopefully upgrading them to newer releases is much more stable.
So I would suggest giving Fedora Silverblue (Gnome desktop), Kinolite (KDE) or Budgie Edition a try.
Well, that could have been fixed by booting from an usb stick, chrooting into you real system and either downloading and (re)installing the python package this way, or, if your package manager depends on python, download the package in the Live Linux and extracting the python package into your system, and then reinstalling it, so the package management overwrites your “manual installation”.
Could be tedious, but less so that having to reinstall everything IMO.