Remove usage of deprecated `distutils.version` module

[lgeiger]

distutils has been deprecated in https://peps.python.org/pep-0632/ and will be completely removed in 3.12.

distutils.version.LooseVersion already started throwing deprecation warnings in Python 3.9 so this PR replaces its usage with packaging.version.parse as the recommended replacement.

Technically this adds packaging as a new direct dependency, but in practice this doesn't matter since it will likely be already installed as an indirect dependency anyway.