I have years of painful experience with node.js, yes. The critical difference between node and python is that there are no system-provided scripts on my system which have `#!/usr/bin/node` as a first line.

There are a load of scripts with `#!/usr/bin/python` (or similar) in `/bin`, which means package resolution can't look first in a local subdir otherwise all bets are off. Again: your system will break depending on which directory you run bits of it from. The system-provided process would be loading dependencies that it was not tested against. In case this is unclear, you do not want that to happen. It would be bad. On my system I can see python scripts involved in driver management. I do not want them to do unexpected things. It would be bad.

Python package management is a mess in lots of ways, but this particular choice isn't one of them.