I don’t know if it is a me problem or if I’m missing the right incantations to set up the environment or whatever. Never had that much problems with Java.
But I’m a Java and Ruby person so it might really be missing knowledge.
I no longer shy away from writing <500 LOC utility/glue scripts in python thanks to uv.
e.g. poetry, venv and pyenv have been mentioned in just the next few comments below yours. and this is just one example. i have seen other such seeming confusion and different statements by different people about what package management approach to use for python.
Prior to that I would frequently have issues (and still have issues with one-off random scripts that use system python).
Your conclusion is correct but not because Python 3 came out in 2008. It was ready to switch to some point a few years later but we'll before 2025 (I don't recall when sorry I didn't do Python at the time!)