Totally true. I didn't write this as a knock against node at all. I think there is a lot that is great there. I was just describing my experience trying to get a project from an experienced, but opinionated in the sense that they had a set of tools they felt would work best for our project, freelancer up and running so that I could make a few changes to integrate it into our development process. I was just trying to give a counterpoint to the idea that node is somehow easier to get up and running than python.

In fact, I would have a lot of the same opinions about getting a python project started as has been voiced in many of the comments here regarding node. I would say "Don't worry about things like conda, virtualenvwrapper, etc. You just need to create a new venv for each project, activate it, and use pip to install any packages you need"

But I'll acknowledge that sometimes you need to do something a little outside the norm and it starts to make sense to rope in some other tools.