Worth pointing out that with Nix/NixOS this problem doesn't exist.

The problem in other distros is that if you prefix PATH so that it contains your executable "foo", and then run a program that invokes "foo" from PATH and expects it to do something else, the program breaks.

With Nix, this problem does not exist because all installed programs invoke all other programs not via PATH but via full absolute paths starting with /nix/store/HASH...