Friend, while I appreciate the time and effort on the docs, it has a rather tiny section on one of the truly worst aspects of pip (and the only one that really guts usability): package conflicts.
Due to the nature of Python as an interpreted language, there is little that you can check in advance via automation around “can package A and package B coexist peacefully with the lowest common denominator of package X”? Will it work? Will it fail? Run your tool/code and hope for the best!
Pip is a nightmare with larger, spawling package solutions (i.e. a lot of the ML work out there). But even with the freshest of venv creations, things still go remarkably wrong rather quick in my experience. My favorite is when someone, somewhere in the dependency tree forgets to lock their version, which ends up blossoming into a ticking time bomb before it abruptly stops working.
Hopefully, your experiences have been far more pleasant than mine.
Which goes swell, until you realize that you are instead dealing with an ever complex and gnawing realization you can barely quantify as existential dread in light of the remarkably complex yet dangerous capabilities found in every human present and yet to be conceived on this suddenly constricting mortal plane, exceeded only by the sheer number of permutations which you generously call ‘best case scenarios’ that result in an irrevocable destructive spiral on the fragile biome only loosely labeled by you as “third rock from the sun”.