When the deploy repository only has the artifacts.tar.gz, all wheels are build from scratch. When changing a single requirements, other unrelated wheels are modified when their build is not reproducible.
When the deploy repository has wheels committed in, a version bump would result in a second wheel for the same requirement. One can possibly delete the existing wheels but ends up with the same issue as above.
The python-build images have a script which takes a list of requirements (/deploy/frozen-requirements.txt), run pip wheel with resulting wheels written to /wheels. The images do not have an ability to be passed previously build wheels to skip building them.
The logic is in operations/docker-images/production-images.git images/python-build/run.sh