I haven't used Poetry and most of my workplaces have done their own thing with versioning Python packages. So my virtualenv experience has been on my own or with toy projects.

I really like writing one-off or sporadically used commandline tools. Loading a virtualenv or navigating to a directory before executing kind of sucks. Generally, I install into my homedir. I haven't read through or tried this out, but it seems like it might better address this use case.

You're right, this seems to be very similar. To me, it looks like it removes one abstraction layer of pushing-popping the environment.