Ah, it might be the venerable missing link to the system root certificates, which Python still leans on?
If we discovered this to be an issue here, I am sure it will not be a single occasion. So, if it proves to be the root cause for this hiccup, we may want to look into using certifi and/or truststore, probably on behalf of crate-python. It would be sad if Python would be behind the onboarding UX of Node.js in such cases, right?
I guess this problem does not happen to users on macOS/Homebrew, because the Homebrew environment will properly supply root certificates through vanilla OpenSSL?
However, without aiming to hijack the conversation too much, Windows users might also find themselves in the same boat, so I think we should improve the situation in general.