ML researcher perspective: Conda is... dog slow, even for relatively simple tasks (clone and run a project). The recommendation nowadays is to use Mamba (iirc), but in my experience (a few years old now) it's been unstable and unable to find package solves which worked on my system / our cluster.

I've settled on just using Poetry for most things, and then using pip in a venv to install the pyproject.toml file from Poetry either in a Dockerfile or directly on a cluster. That's worked fairly well so far, even with torch/cuda (and the mess of CUDA versioning) and from macOS to Linux.

I think uv/rye is a good next step, Poetry can be a bit slow as well at times.