It’s been a while since I last downloaded anaconda. But I remember when clicking on the download page, it would show the usual “choose your OS > download binary” (eg this archived version in 2019).
Recently I helped someone else set it up and it showed a form to put on email, with smaller gray text near the bottom of the form about skipping it.
Does this count as a dark pattern?
Conda environments can encapsulate more than just Python packages, it brings the pip/venv model to the ecosystems of many languages (R, Go, etc.), and does so at the user level rather than in a folder for one project. The other Anaconda stuff is pretty useless IMO, but Conda is exceptionally useful. Although I would echo what the other commentor said that the mambaforge version is even better than vanilla miniconda