npm is objectively worse. Base pip packages aren't getting hijacked.

That's not a controversial opinion. I'd say it's worse than pip. At least pip doesn't put nag messages on the console or fill up your hard drive with half a gigabyte of small files. OP is confused.

In my experience npm is not great but it does work most of the time. I just tried installing bunch of stuff using pip and NONE of them worked. Python is backwards compatibility hell. Python 2 vs 3, dependencies missing, important libraries being forked and not working anymore. If the official installation instructions are 'pip install X' and it doesn't work then what's the point?

npm has A LOT of issues but generally when I do 'npm i' i installs things and they work.

But the main point is that cargo is just amazing :)

P.S. Never used ruby.

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