I was worried that even miniconda seemed kinda bloaty, but it was the only way I could consistently use numpy on apple silicon. Really good option for local dev environments
If you haven't yet, try out mamba. It's more or less a drop-in conda replacement but written in C++ using a super fast SAT solver. The speed difference is incredible--I rarely even have time to finish reading the output before it's done installing a conda environment.
Thank you very much for this suggestion. My team's workflow is conda heavy and this will speed up my development by orders of magnitude.