I guess it's a great exercise to set up a repository yourself in this way, but once you have experience with the technologies involved, it's much easier to just use a cookiecutter template [1] to set up your package. Another aspect to consider is that there are often different tools to achieve the same goal, thus, it makes sense to experiment until you've found your perfect package setup.
Excellent points! I have seen several cookiecutter templates, but like you said, those aren't very useful when you are at the very start and everything looks weird and new.
[1] https://github.com/search?q=python+package+cookiecutter