Anaconda is a massive pain in the ass that creates far more dependency problems than it solves. Pip and venv are the way to go. If you don't like managing projects on the command line. Jetbrains IDEs are very good, and I'm sure people have their own favorites.
My experience as well. Anaconda users have weird problems nobody else has when it comes to running perfectly reasonable python code, and especially struggle when it comes to integrating outside the anaconda ecosystem. I tell people to avoid it if at all possible.