> The fact that everything pollutes the global environment
This is not anything like a fact. For three years now (since the 3.11 release) Python distributions on Linux have in fact taken special measures to prevent the user from using tools other than the system package manager to install into the global environment. And for thirteen years (since the 3.3 release) Python has offered standard library functionality to create isolated environments specifically to avoid that problem. (And that functionality is based on a third party library with public releases going back eighteen years.)
Pip is designed around giving you the freedom to choose where those environments are (by separately creating them) and your strategy for maintaining them (from a separate environment per-project as a dev, to a single-environment-still-isolated-from-the-system for everything as a data scientist, and everything in between).
This is not anything like a fact. For three years now (since the 3.11 release) Python distributions on Linux have in fact taken special measures to prevent the user from using tools other than the system package manager to install into the global environment. And for thirteen years (since the 3.3 release) Python has offered standard library functionality to create isolated environments specifically to avoid that problem. (And that functionality is based on a third party library with public releases going back eighteen years.)
Pip is designed around giving you the freedom to choose where those environments are (by separately creating them) and your strategy for maintaining them (from a separate environment per-project as a dev, to a single-environment-still-isolated-from-the-system for everything as a data scientist, and everything in between).