Fast forward 30 years and we really don't use most systems like that anymore, especially in production environments. We run things in VMs or containers and build them up from scratch with ease--it's all just cattle. Python hasn't really adapted to that new reality.
You might think this is silly but think about something like making a systemd service to run your python script in a venv--how do you do it? You have to activate the script or call its python bin, but it's not obvious how to do that in any python docs.
It doesn't matter which language you're using, any non-trivial code you have is going to have dependencies which you will need to pull in.
If you try to build it in a completely clean container, you can ensure that you have caught every dependency, and you will eliminate all of the "but it works on my machine!" problems that used to plague people.
You disagree that "you shouldn't need a clean OS every time you want to use a new language version"!? ... I don't even know what to say, that's not something you can disagree with
> If you try to build it in a completely clean container, you can ensure that you have caught every dependency, and you will eliminate all of the "but it works on my machine!"
This is what testing is for. You don't need to cripple your development environment to have confidence your code works in other environments. Talk about the ends not justifying the means.
