conda is a non-standard python tooling with canned environments with packages that are years out of date, a constraint solver in its package manager that randomly seems to run forever, and it's a commercial product.

Of all the Python packaging solutions, it's the worst.

The fact that so many people use it, as a matter of course, is further evidence of the fragility and complexity of maintaining Python tooling and codebases in general. The fragility of Python packaging is how we arrived at the current status quo of needing a CD/CI setup for hello-world.py. My statically-linked Fortran executables? I could keep copying around the same binaries until people switched architecture.