What do you think about the linked thread?
> The python ecosystem is not a giant mess, its just dependency hell.
There are dozens (?) of actively used package and environment management systems, with no consistency and no lockfiles, many packages ignore semver, and having multiple versions of a package installed causes weird issues. I'm not sure why "a giant mess" is an invalid descriptor, I guess it's just arguing semantics.
I already posted multiple posts in the thread under the same username. Other than adding important consumers of a dependency to its tests, the only solution I could come up with is to move AI/ML packages into their own repository where they can move at their own pace and do pins/overrides more freely and/or drastically reduce the amount of python packages in nixpkgs.
So in practice, it's not really a bigger problem for nix than for any other release. If you need to freeze versions for an app, you freeze them. If you don't or if you're packaging a library, you can (usually) rely on automated PR testing to catch breakages and deal with them there.
Even if authors are not responsive, nix maintainers provide the required patches or disable the broken functionality. So no, things are mostly ok.
Right now in nixpkgs we manage all dependencies in all packages front to back. So all dependencies of a dependency and dependencies of dependency dependencies and so on.