Basically, Reitz marketed pipenv as _the_ package management tool recommended by Python, by which he meant PyPA, which he was on the board of at the time.
This was displayed prominently on on the front page of the pipenv docs.
After push back, that claim was amended to _the_ package tool recommended by PyPA, not Python.
Then shit blew up on /r/python and someone else from PyPA stepped in to clarify that pipenv was _a_ package tool recommended by PyPA.
And then there was a lot of angry reddit comments, and blog posts.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/8jd6aq/why_is_pipen...
https://web.archive.org/web/20180519001601/http://journal.ke...
I wasn't really up to date with Python community drama, but when I had to write a new app in Python, I went looking for something better than pip and a requirements.txt and I chose pipenv, because shit, it was the recommended package management tool for Python, right?
Then I found that pipenv really sucked in many magical and horrible ways, and then the drama about that alleged recommendation broke out.
Anyway, basically, Reitz made claims about pipenv that weren't exactly outright fabrications, but they were very much distorting the truth, people called him on it, he blogged, and then the uptake of pipenv dropped dramatically and people started to realise Poetry was far better.
One issue I experienced was that pipenv would choke and die on dependency graphs that Poetry found to be super easy, barely an inconvenience.
Oh and upgrading Python or pipenv was risky AF because of how closely coupled pipenv was to pip code.
