Yes, there was some questionable comms around pipenv being "officially recommdnded" which upon closer inspection seemed to have come from the people who wrote it and not really been that official so far as I could see! That seems to have been walked back after a while but not before it gained traction and randoms bring up that it's official even now.
I really hate to be this “inside baseball” and negative about it all, but I think that the Kenneth Reitz factor is…unique (within the Python community), and uniquely dangerous in these situations. I am so deeply fed up with the Python packaging experience. At this point, both my eyes are set on the fastest way to some sort of standardisation and improvement. Its because of this that I want to clearly acknowledge that IMO over the last 5 years we were thrown off course in no small part by one person’s lust for personal notoriety when the community clearly needed to bring their heads together on a solution. Pipenv was touted as the be all end all way too quickly, as you said not necessarily by ‘official sources’, and those shaky shaky years left everyone a bit battered.
When I did my every-12-months checkin to see how Python dependency management was going, I sure enough saw that Pipenv is ‘under’ PyPA now. I then learned that a PyPA endorsement or association. doesn’t mean a HUGE amount for the reasons that you and others have already noted. Sure enough, PyPA’s own packaging documentation is hesitant to strongly prefer a front end tool let alone any other part of the stack.
A significantly improved Python dependency management story could very well include Pipenv on the front end for all I care. But not acknowledging the elephant in the room risks repeating past mistakes. Lest we end up with more of the celebrity developer culture we see in communities like JS, but without the seemingly limitless effort and resources.
None of this is to understate the technical challenges, especially taking into account pulling together the current fragmented ecosystem.
