Our experience is gcloud and some other commands get messed up :/

Probably not asdf's fault, though. I've had multiple issues with gcloud not being compatible with my setup, spamming errors like /tmp/_MEIRZ3igG/libssl.so.1.1

But what asdf doesn't solve, though, is the setup for new devs. Python projects can sometimes take days to get running properly on a machine because of various differences, asdf solves some of it but replaces it with other installation steps instead.

That's what I like about a dockerized setup, if it works one place it works for everyone (almost, nix is probably better).

I can't speak to Python beyond the fairly minimal touch points I have with our projects, but Python anecdotally seems much rougher than it should be in many respects. But pretty much everything I touch (Node, Java, Ruby, dotnet-core) ends up being solved with asdf, a Brewfile for the Mac users and yum-and-xargs for the Fedora folks (me), in very short order. As far as new machines go, I have a shell script that I share with new folks (and my own version for a new machine) that just gets things done. (Used to use chef-zero, but that got really crusty.)

I like Docker for a lot of things. That said, on code inside containers is pretty awful, in my experience, and I'd much rather use docker-compose with something like Traefik to route outside Docker so I can run my service locally and everything works as I expect it. You can always tell a project that I work on because there's a bash script in there that fires up tmux with docker-compose, all services under nodemon, ngrok, etc. all good to go. ;)