OP here, I think this was just an absolute terrible choice for Python to make, especially when nearly all other package manager systems of all other languages allow for somehow a relatively 'safe' global installation of packages on a device.

Happy to hear reasons why Python made the "right" decision here, though.

My speculation is that the average developer today never learned systems-adminstration skills and is not able to modify paths and/or hunt down and remove packages causing conflicts.

That said, installing non-distro provided packages with sudo never made any sense.

But yes, having to pass –-break-system-packages to install to your user area in ~/.local is moronic. I only use venvs for big work projects and have never had a single unsolvable conflict in twenty years. And zero of any sort in the last five+.