COMP: rewise depedencies for distutils

I added a workaround of explicitely listing setuptools in #1107 to address the new CI error about missing distutils, but ultimately you may want to look at it how best to declare this dependency (and/or whether you can patch around it with some different cython/extension-helpers/etc or you need to keep this current workaround)

Review the explicit setuptools workaround added in #1107 and the CI error about missing distutils. Then inspect the project's dependency declarations and the mentioned cython or extension-helpers options; done means the dependency is declared or the workaround is replaced and CI passes.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.