Basically just use virtual environments via the venv module. The only thing you really need to know is that Python doesn't support having multiple versions of a package installed in the same environment. That means you need to get very familiar with creating (and destroying) environments. You don't need to know any of this if you just use tools that happen to be written in Python. But if you plan to write Python code then you do. It should be in Python books really, but they tend to skip over the boring stuff.

How do you learn anything in the space of software engineering? In general, there are many different problems and even more solutions with different tradeoffs.

To avoid spending hours on fixing broken environments after a single "pip install", I would make it easy to rollback to a known state. For example, recreate virtualenv from a lock requirements file stored in git: `pipenv sync` (or corresponding command using your preferred tool).