I certainly understand why non-technical folks would like conda, but to me, it's 1) extremely slow to restore a complete environment and 2) hard to interoperate

I certainly understand why non-technical folks would like conda, but to me, it's 1) extremely slow to restore a complete environment and 2) hard to interoperate with, as it uses it's own compiler and toolchain. Personally, I've come to prefer homebrew python + pip for development on macOS (even though said python is not optimized), and clearlinux + pip for Linux and production use. Clearlinux actually gives you a pretty simple way to install a highly optimized python and most all common libs (numpy, scipy, ML stuff, even with GPU and Intel MKL support) - then you just run a pip install -r requirements.txt to get the small, pure python stuff that you want on top that foundation.