When learning kayaking you have to practice a water escape, I wish there was something similar for driver's ed in the Netherlands. Thinking about it is terrifying.
I tried out duckdb-spatial for a hobby project and my takeaway is the main thing it offers over geopandas is performance in batch processing.
If I can reduce my spatial analysis to SQL and optimize that SQL a little bit, duckdb will happily saturate my CPUs and memory to process things fast in a way that a Python script struggles to do.
Yes, the static linking is nice. It helps with the problem of reproducible environments in Python. But that's not a game changer IMO.
A good interface is testable, this is how you build up reliable abstractions to solve higher level problems. The devs on my team that take shortcuts here waste more time in the end.
Python's json is an often-quoted example of why not to have it in the standard lib. There are some bad defaults that no one can fix for stability reasons. Though I admit it does come in handy sometimes.
In production, I've lately seen serde_json backed python implementations, this makes sense for performance and memory safety.