Ha, I used pyinstall and QT for the first time during a one off project. Smoothest GUI development I've ever done coming from knowing nothing about the stack. Esp. pyinstall. Had to do literally nothing for win/mac/unix builds.
To be fair though, it was a relatively simple app, but I feel that's the typical use case if you're already proficient in python and just want to add some buttons.
I don't hear about using this stack much, so I'm glad it's getting improvements + more attention!
At Vorta (https://github.com/borgbase/vorta/) we're also happy users of the PyQt + PyInstaller stack. Not really needed for Linux, but great for macOS. It's even possible to use Sparkle via PyObjc for automatic updates. Be sure to build "appdir" packages to get a proper macOS package that can be notarized with Apple.
I wrote a small Python program for a group of non-tech people, and all throughout development I was dreading how much time I was going to have to spend helping everyone through the installation process. But Pyinstaller made it as simple as "download and run". Super quick to set up and no one had issues at all.
Pyinstaller can be a nightmare depending on what dependencies you have. I believe it doesn't copy data files by default, so you have to either write a spec file for the library or include those files yourself in your program spec.
After everything is set up, though, things usually work smoothly.
I don't remember having to do much of that except picking what files I wanted (was a few folders in this case). It makes sense thought. You typically don't want to bundle what you don't need to, so making you set that config isn't the worst thing.
To be fair though, it was a relatively simple app, but I feel that's the typical use case if you're already proficient in python and just want to add some buttons.
I don't hear about using this stack much, so I'm glad it's getting improvements + more attention!