Thank you. My recollection was unclear, because I wasn’t really aware of the original development of conda. My feeling was that it was even earlier (my own involvement in packaging goes back before wheels, to the creation of distutils) but that’s after-the-fact reasoning, and I hadn’t bothered looking up details.
Many of the changes PyPA is working to have extremely long timescales (for the same reason, getting people to move off “legacy” approaches is an incredibly slow process, if you don’t want to just alienate everyone). So as a serious question - why not work towards that goal now? It may not happen for a long time, but we can make incremental changes, establish standards for new projects, etc? That’s very much the norm, so I don’t see why it couldn’t work for something like this.
Of course, there’s no guarantee that everyone shares your view on the ideal solution (and if you’re looking to standardise on conda-style environments, that will include the core devs, as venv is a stdlib facility) but I’d hope that negotiation and compromise isn’t out of the question here 