[xnyan]

This is fundamentally mistaken advice, not because it’s necessarily it’s wrong to run python modules in the administrator context (although you probably don’t need to) but it is always a bad idea to run command with root/administrator privileges without understanding why you are doing so and why root privs are needed.

If you don’t need global system access to these modules, appending —-user to pip will install in the user context, no elevated privs needed.

[rini17]

Why isn't it the default?

According to the superuser link, in the previous version it worked by default without privileged access.