This is actually rather a reason to avoid Python in my opinion. You don't want pip to pollute your system with untracked files. There are tools like virtualenv to contain your Python dependencies but this isn't by default, and pip is generally rather primitive compared to npm.
Ubuntu complains now if you try to use pip outside a virtual environment… I think things are in a basically ok state as far as that goes.
Arguably it could be a little easier to automatically start up a virtual environment if you call pip outside of one… but, I dunno, default behavior that papers over too many errors is not great. If they don’t get a hard error, confused users might become even more confused when they don’t learn they need to load a virtual environment to get things working.
The industry standard has been Poetry for a good few years now, and UV is the newer exciting tool in this space. Both create universal lockfiles from more loosely specified dependencies in pyproject.toml resulting in reproducible environments across systems, (they create isolated Python environments per project).
pip, pipx, pipenv, conda, setuptools, poetry, uv, pdm, easy_install, venv, virtualenv
I really hope we are at the end game with poetry or uv. I can't take it anymore.
uv to me seems to be the next big one, pycharm already trying to integrate it, but it needs a lot more polish. Once the most used Python tools adopt uv it's pretty much game over. Course I always hope the industry adopts the best tool, but then they adopt the worst possible tools.