Dependency management has always felt complicated. However, environment management I think is actually way simpler than people realize. Python basically just walks up directories trying to find its packages dir. A python "env" is just a copy of the python binary in its own directory. That's pretty much it. Basically all difficulties I've ever had with Python environments have been straightened out by going back to that basic understanding. I feel like the narrative about virtualenvs has always seemed scary but the reality really isn't.