Somehow in the 15 years of working with Python on Linux, I've never broken anything using pip.
Debian is particularly bad because they'd comingle python 2 and 3 packages in the same filesystem locations if you used pip out of the box.
That was a horrid discovery on my part. I assumed, coming from java where this sort of thing has been a long solved problem, that no one would be daft enough to do something like that.