They have their place. But the default shouldn't force you into a "project" when you want general purpose applicability. Python should work from the shell as readily as it did 20 years ago. Not mysteriously break what used to work with no low-friction replacement.
Python can work from the shell, if you don’t have external dependencies. But once you have external dependencies, with incompatible potential versions, I just don’t see how you could do this with “one environment”.