No matter how you look at it, the dependencies have to go somewhere. Node uses node_modules, most compiled languages require compiled libraries (or they're a huge blob), etc. Idk about PHP but I'm pretty sure 3rd party things for any given app also live somewhere. Different ways of managing dependencies. It's recommended that venvs are used in Python because you may accidentally nuke a system script by doing global installs, and otherwise there still needs to be some sort of 3p version handling when you have multiple projects going.

Once something works in Python (which uv now makes trivial; before it could be a pain), updating 3rd party packages rarely cause breakage. But yes, I think many who use it hardly update, because things usually continue to work for years and the attack surface is pretty narrow[0]. Heck just a few days ago I checked out a project that I hadn't touched in years, which I wrote in Python 3.7; updated to 3.13 and it continued to just work. Compare to PHP which has a far higher attack surface[1] and often has breaking changes. I've heard a couple nightmare stories of a v7.x -> v8.x move being delayed because it required a serious codebase rewrite.

[0] https://www.cvedetails.com/product/18230/Python-Python.html?... [1] https://www.cvedetails.com/product/128/PHP-PHP.html?vendor_i...