In 2015, Robert Kuska proposed to remove the patch from Fedora:
"This check should be covered by rpmlint which MUST be run during the review so I propose to drop this patch."
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1287566#c1

But Toshio Ernie Kuratomi explained that the patch is a practical solution to avoid rpath on /usr/lib64 for all Fedora libraries (built by Python):
"I would recommend against dropping the patch.  Since it's only removing LIBDIR, it's removing an rpath that should never be needed (the dynamic linker will try LIBDIR on its own, no need for an rpath to make it do so).  The patch means that distutils does not add the unneeded rpath to any binaries it generates which is what that Debian page recommends (patch the build system).  If we were to drop the patch, then package maintainers of C extensions would need to add boilerplate to their packages which strips the unnecessary rpath.  Better to do that in a single place (the python package) if we can.

If you do decide to drop rpath, you should also coordinate updating all existing C extension packages to include the boilerplate removing rpath.  Python packaging guidelines could also be updated to mention it (but not strictly necessary -- the rpath guidelines cover this... it would just be keeping the information in one place)."
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1287566#c2