I believe Nix and Guix also work this way.
Agreed, especially on Windows.
It just works.
This is pushing it. It's not hard to break conda or put yourself in situation where the updater/dependency checker gets stuck and doesn't know what to do, especially once you start adding conda-forge packages. But it does do a better job than anything else I've tried (although poetry + pyenv on Linux is getting much better)
FWIW, we are soon going to be releasing a much faster depedency resolver. We are also thinking hard about how best to address the "growing ecosystem" problem, in a future-proof way.
Fantastic. Easily my biggest complaint about conda.
For starters, there is no /usr/local symlinking process. It's also possible to have multiple versions of e.g. python installed and active. Homebrew is like a poor-man's Nix.