I admit I'm not super well versed in what conda's main uses are. Python's whole tooling situation has felt like a nightmare & I've tried to keep far away, but I've had to face it a lot more recently because it's so prevalent for AI. Thankfully uv seems to have done a huge amount of what I need.

Still, if the concern is language-agnostic ways to use tooling, mise (nee rtx) is the 1000 pound gorilla in the room today. Incredibly fast well built Rust based tool that has really massively expanded in scope & offerings, with grace & elegance. I thought it was an asdf replacement, for installing/using toolchains, for .tool-versions files. But it's really grown to be a lot more, capable of letting you isolatedly manage tools it can install from a huge variety of backends (pip, npm, cargo, others). https://mise.jdx.dev/dev-tools/backends/