> and me being 8 years out of date with my python skillz i have no idea what the current SOTA is with python venv tooling :/

It doesn't really matter, by the time you sit down and use it you'll find whatever that is, has also been deprecated and replaced by 2 more.

The problem with software development in 2023 in a nutshell, well played sir.

The reality is that if you ask 3 different people you're going to get 3 different answers. They're fundamentally the same, just a matter of package management. As far as I'm aware, the current "SOTA" is Poetry. I liked Pipenv for quite some time, but Poetry is just so much faster IME.

It also makes it very hard for new devs willing to learn Python. Coming from Ruby and JavaScript, you just use bundler or npm, but Python is so strange, even the way it runs files is different, with the module thing.

> i dont need them demystified, i need someone smarter than me to just tell me what to do lol

Dockerfile ;)