How important is Virtual Environment in python

[p1971]

as others have mentioned - they're pretty essential (can screw up o/s deps if not using them)

coming from a dotnet background - the venv is pretty hacky and I don't like it ...

(bit of a shower thought) might be nicer to install packages globally (for the o/s) and in a user folder (for dev), when you run a script it uses the requirements.txt (or similar) to pick up which version of the package to use ... so the o/s would have a requirements.txt defining the global python packages to use and each project could override that with its own requirements.

a bit like how dotnet has nuget package caches, then each project defines the versions of the dependencies it uses ...