This issue basically tracks the root goal of obviating pkg_resources, in particular that Setuptools depends on it.

Over the past few years, myself and others have worked hard to create importlib.resources and importlib.metadata in the goal of superseding pkg_resources. These libraries are now very stable and replacing much of the functionality provided by pkg_resources.

In python/importlib_metadata#38, I examined the setuptools package to determine its level of dependency on pkg_resources. Unsurprisingly, there is a diverse set of interfaces on which setuptools relies.

Nevertheless, this project should work toward Setuptools adopting the importlib features in place of pkg_resources.