Need to forward port changes from sdf16 to main

[scpeters]

There are quite a few changes that have been merged to sdf16 after that branch was created from 74353b0 that are not present on main.

main...sdf16

A non-exhaustive list of sdf16 commits don't obviously appear on main:

• Optimize load time and memory consumption by reusing element descriptions #1589 db6bdbb
• Respect GZ_PYTHON_INSTALL_PATH if passed as an argument #1586 ae7ac38
• Fixed windows warning #1595 7e409b5

[scpeters]

I think we can use mergify port these individual pull requests to main and close this after we have confirmed that we aren't missing any commits on main