One thing to remember about conda is they changed their licensing last year:
“We clarified our definition of commercial usage in our Terms of Service in an update on Sept. 30, 2020. The new language states that use by individual hobbyists, students, universities, non-profit organizations, or businesses with less than 200 employees is allowed, and all other usage is considered commercial and thus requires a business relationship with Anaconda.”
(from Anaconda | Anaconda Commercial Edition FAQ). This is a big difference.
I did use conda in the past. It was definitely better than plain pip but still had its own issues. See my reply in a similar thread Data Science on nixos nix, poetry, pip, mach-nix, pynixify: - all fail? - #29 by alexv. The summary of my setup is in the same thread: Data Science on nixos nix, poetry, pip, mach-nix, pynixify: - all fail? - #11 by alexv. I also remember reading something about the low quality of the SAT solver they use to figure out the dependencies and the inconsistent versioning if you use additional channels which explained those massive downgrades I experienced.