Having dealt only a tiny bit with Node, GYP (it's garbage C++ interop layer) and the inexplicable dependency on Python (???) being installed on the devs machine in order to build the C++ code that got copied into node_modules, I know better than to ever try another library making use of that.
I don't think you have less dep when building other c++ projects. People also use automake, autoconf or whatever to generate makefiles. It is just that the author choose python here. I never see anybody writes makefile manually and build moderate or big size project. There are always tons of tools used.
