[HappMacDonald]

My understanding is that the entire reason that venv exists is because python's library system is nothing but dependency spaghetti: whatever is needed by one project conflicts with whatever is needed by another so you have to give them bespoke library environments where those conflicts won't interfere with one another.

In that perspective "merging" them directly defeats the purpose. What is needed is a better library ecosystem.

[zahlman]

venvs are used to isolate groups of dependencies, but it's not just about conflicts. Many other languages expect you to do the same thing; people complain less because either the language statically resolves imports and can support multiple versions of a library in the same environment; and/or because the ecosystem has some conventions that allow the tooling to detect the "current environment" better, and/or because the standard installer isn't itself a library that defaults to appearing in every environment and installing specifically for "its own" environment; and/or (possibly the biggest one) they don't have to worry about building and installing complex multi-language projects where the one they're using is just providing a binding.

An important reason for using them is to test deployment: if your code works in a venv that only has specific things installed (not just some default "sandbox" where you install everything), then you can be sure that you didn't forget to list a dependency in the metadata. Plus you can test with ranges of versions of your dependencies and confirm which ones your library will work with.

They're also convenient for making neat, isolated installations for applications. Pipx wraps pip and venv to do this, and as I understand it there's similarly uvx for uv. This is largely about making sure you avoid "interference", but also about pinning specific versions of dependencies. It also lowers the bar somewhat for your users: they still need to have a basic idea of what Python is and know that they have a suitable version of Python installed, but you can tell them to install Pipx if they don't have it and run a single install command, instead of having to wrestle with both pip and venv and then also know how to access the venv's console scripts that might not have been put on PATH.