> I really don't understand why you can't just pip install something globally. I want this package to be available to me EVERYWHERE, why can't I do it? I only use python recreationally because everyone uses python everywhere and you can't escape it. So there is a massive possibility I am simply wrong and pip-installing something globally is a huge risk. I'm just not understanding it.

You may have a library that's been globally installed, and you have multiple projects that rely on it. One day you may need to upgrade the library for use in one project, but there are backward incompatibile changes in the upgrade, so now all of your other projects break when you upgrade the global library.

In general, when projects are used by multiple people across multiple computers, it's best to have the specific dependencies and versions specified in the project itself so that everyone using that project is using the exact same version of each dependency.

For recreational projects it's not as big of a deal. It's just harder to do a recreation of your environment.