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The existence of poetry, hatch, pdm, etc. (and lately rye) is proof that "just use pip-tools" isn't consensus.

It is a current truth that there are modern apps of interest to me written in Python that I can't install because I need some special dependency manager or environment manager or something and it looks like I will do serious harm to my system environment if I follow the installation instructions.

I'm not sure I understand you. If the project uses something "special" like poetry, hatch, pdm, etc., you only need to install those for development. If you simply want to use the project, they all should be installable directly with pip, as they all have pep517-compatible backends.

Even then, how can installing those tools harm your system? You can always use pipx and have each tool be installed in its own virtual environment.

My biggest problem with pip-compile is that it's really slow. Pip-compile runs can take upwards of 20 minutes, depending on how many dependencies your project has.

We use it because we don't have any alternative. I'd really love to have a faster tool though.