I have heard of similar experiences on HN a few times. Haven't seen any such conflicts on real projects in the last five years or so, since I started using Poetry and then UV. I deal with data science code and the people writing it have a tendency to create dependency spaghetti, for example including the Scikit package in a mainly Pytorch code, just because they need a tried-and-tested accuracy() function.

I do remember banging my head against failed dependency resolution in my Early days of Python, circa 2014, with Pip and Conda, etc.

The dependency issues I have faced were mostly due to data science folks pinning exact package versions for the sake of replicability in requirements.txt for example