cached copies of crates that you downloaded

Meh, what else is it supposed to do, delete sources all the time? Then people with slow connections will complain.

Also size-wise that's actually not even much (though they could take the care to compress it), what actually takes up space with rust is compile artifacts, per workspace. Have you heard of kondo?

This is programmer humor, 95% of the people here still get defeated by semicolons, have never used a debugger, and struggle to exit vim.

This article someone linked is not 14 years old and it perfectly describes the mess python and pip are: https://chriswarrick.com/blog/2023/01/15/how-to-improve-python-packaging/

My favorite part is:

Most importantly: which tool should a beginner use? The PyPA has a few guides and tutorials, one is using pip + venv, another is using pipenv (why would you still do that?), and another tutorial that lets you pick between Hatchling (hatch’s build backend), setuptools, Flit, and PDM, without explaining the differences between them

But yes, following old blog post is the issue.

They're not difficult by any means.

But they are tedious when compared to other solutions.

Try not to learn too much from memes, they're mostly wrong. Conda is good, if you're looking for something more modern (for Python) I'd suggest Poetry