I just got caught up in this one today working on an Ubuntu 23.04. Ironically, I was trying to re-install pipx, following an OS upgrade, in the user environment so that it could install apps without potentially breaking the system packages.

Reading the PEP, it recommends pipx but it recommends that you get it via your distribution instead of using pip --user which will no longer now work without the --break-system-packages flag. It also mentions the irony of that. Though I think in this case and if you don't want to use the distro packaged pipx, using the break flag won't cause any harm.