I wrote PHP/JS/Java before Python. Been doing Python for nearly a decade too, and like 4dregress haven't had the need to worry much about dep management. JS and PHP had all sorts of issues, Maven & Gradle are still the ones that gave me less trouble. With Python I found that most issues could be fixed by finding the PEP that implemented what I needed, and by trying to come up with a simple workflow & packaging strategy.

Nowadays I normally use `python venv/bin/<some-executable>`, or `conda run -n <some-env> <some-executable>`, or packaged it in a Singularity container. And even though I hear a lot of good things about uv, given that my job uses public money for research, we try to use open source and standards as much as possible. My understanding is that uv is still backed by a company, and at least when I checked it some time ago (in peps discussions & GH issues) they were no implementing the PEPs that I needed -- even if they did, we would probably still stay with simple pip/setuptools to avoid having to use research budget to update our build if the company ever changed its business model (e.g. what anaconda did some months/year? ago).

Digressing: the Singularity container is useful for research & HPC too, as it creates a single archive, which is faster to load on distributed filesystems like the two I work on (GPFS & LustreFS) instead of loading many small files over network.