Pipenv solves a very real problem, but it has a lot of problems of its own:

- It's very slow: re-locking after updating 1 dependency often takes me ~1 minute.

- It has lots of bugs. To name a few in 11.6.9: clobbers comments in the Pipfile, inconsistently includes dependencies for other build environments in Pipfile.lock, stores the wrong index in Pipfile.lock for packages not on PyPI.

- They release multiple times per day, often breaking things in patch releases.

- Kenneth Reitz is quite unpleasant to deal with in GitHub issues, which I often have to because of the previous 2 issues.

From what I've heard, Pipenv "has been officially blessed" only insofar as its maintainer got commit access to PyPA's documentation and inserted a recommendation.