I went through the same progression, thinking pipenv was the official solution before deciding it wasn’t. Then, just now, I realized that pipenv [1] is currently owned by the Python Packaging Authority (PyPA) who also owns pip [2] and virtualenv [3]. I don’t know the right answer but this illustrates the confusion of not coalescing around an official solution.

[1]: https://github.com/pypa/pipenv

[2]: https://github.com/pypa/pip

[3]: https://github.com/pypa/virtualenv

What happened was that Kenneth Reitz socially-engineered his way into the PyPA to get his tool blessed. The community lashed out (since the tool had obvious shortcomings and a somewhat dubious development process) and recommendations were softened. Eventually the PyPA had to take over pipenv when Reitz had other issues, and they are now forever burdened with what is a bit of a dud.

As I understand it, that was to prevent bad behavior rather than to signal approval.