I tried out duckdb-spatial for a hobby project and my takeaway is the main thing it offers over geopandas is performance in batch processing.

If I can reduce my spatial analysis to SQL and optimize that SQL a little bit, duckdb will happily saturate my CPUs and memory to process things fast in a way that a Python script struggles to do.

Yes, the static linking is nice. It helps with the problem of reproducible environments in Python. But that's not a game changer IMO.