Yeah, this is how I feel too. A lot of the movement in Python packaging seems to be more in managing projects than managing packages or even environments. I tend to not want to think about a "project" until very late in the game, after I've already written a bunch of code. I don't want "make a project" to be something I'm required or even encouraged to do at the outset.
I have the opposite feeling, and that's why I like uv. I don't want to deal with "environments". When I run a Python project I want its PYTHONPATH to have whatever libraries its config file says it should have, and I don't want to have to worry about how they get there.
I set up a "sandbox" project as an early step of setting up a new PC.
Sadly for certain types of projects like GIS, ML, scientific computing, the dependencies tend to be mutually incompatible and I've learned the hard way to set up new projects for each separate task when using those packages. `uv init; uv add <dependencies>` is a small amount of work to avoid the headaches of Torch etc.
