> Perhaps you can point me to some use cases where the triple
> platform tag is really useful.

If I understand correctly (and ABI isn't my strong suite), it would be useful in the sense that you could utilize it to create a sort of "fat wheel" that included the .so's for multiple architectures and then pip could simply drop them all into place and have the interpreter decide which one to load. This is useful because maybe you have one .so in a wheel and 30 .py files, it's somewhat wasteful (both disk space and in cache efficiency) to have 10 different wheel files and those 30 .py files duplicated when it could be possible to have a single one serving 10 different architectures.

To be clear, this ability doesn't yet exist in Wheel and I don't know of anyone pushing for it, but if Python is smart enough to load the right .so that makes fat wheels significantly easier to implement (in fact, you wouldn't need to add anything else to pip or the wheel spec to handle it I think).