This sounds like an improvement. In my work related laptops, I still favor conda because it seems to do really robust dependency checking.

I do many short experiments that are usually not work related (in the sense that it is not paid for work). I strongly favor spinning up fresh VPNs for these experiments and when I need Python (and often Hy/hylang, a Lisp syntax for Python), I usually just use the system python3 installation and use “—user” for pip installs to my home directory. There are probably many reasons not to do this, but I justify this bit of sloppiness because I tend to discard VPNs fairly quickly.