I think there’s several reasons for that, not the least of which is that you can’t distribute python bytecode.

With java, I run through an intentional compilation step and then ship the jar file to my consumers. I’d never ship a .pyc to the field.

In python (specifically cpython), that step is just an implementation detail of the interpreter/runtime.
If you ever used something other than the default python interpreter, it probably wouldn’t implement the same bytecode subsystem under the hood. Python bytecode isn’t part of the spec.