Wheels can be production friendly if you know that you're only ever going to care about one specific OS family, and your app is pure python+stuff available on PyPi.

For internal use, where you can just pretend everything other than Debian based systems don't exist, it's ok, but I definitely see the value of docker, even though I like Snap a lot more.

I'm surprised nobody has ever made a "distro" where all the packages had a thin python wrapper and installed from a private Pip repository, so you could package your whole app and all dependencies with it.