my current project is at 16 dependencies atm and ... its really not as bad as you make it sound.

    pipenv lock  5.65s user 0.29s system 77% cpu 7.639 total

i think 7.6 seconds is fine for an operation that you'd rarely do

it would probably take ages at work though. just opening a WSL terminal takes several seconds there, which is predictably instantaneous (<100ms) on fedora linux at home