It seems that from importlib.metadata import entry_points will work even before 3.10.

Reproduced here from this link, emphasis mine:

The “selectable” entry points were introduced in importlib_metadata 3.6 and Python 3.10. Prior to those changes, entry_points accepted no parameters and always returned a dictionary of entry points, keyed by group. For compatibility, if no parameters are passed to entry_points, a SelectableGroups object is returned, implementing that dict interface. In the future, calling entry_points with no parameters will return an EntryPoints object. Users should rely on the selection interface to retrieve entry points by group.

Before 3.10 stdlib, and older importlib_metadata, all of the entry_points in $PREFIX/lib/python-3* are discovered and parsed without any kind of cache. In a large environment, this can take a number of seconds. The venerable entrypoints did this a bit better, but is now deprecated, leaving this half-measure until 3.9 EOL to avoid getting bitten by inconsistent return types and performance cliffs.