conda ruined my shell and never successfully worked for me. I guess YMMV

All my experience with Conda is from helping my friend nuke it off his laptop

have you tried pixi for this?

same here; I now prefer uv but conda served us very well, and allowed us to maintain stable reproducible environments; being able to have multiple environments for a given project is also sometimes handy vs a single pyproject.toml

miniconda

yup