Can highly recommend pixi. It really is the "uv but for Conda" and actually quite a bit more imo. Don't know how relevant this is for you, but many packages like PyTorch are not being built for Intel Macs anymore or some packages like OpenCV are built such that they require macOS 13+. That's usually not too much of a problem on your most likely pretty modern dev machine but when shipping software to customers you want to support old machines. In the Conda ecosystem, stuff is being built for a wide variety of platforms, much more than the wheels you'd find on pypi.org so that can be very useful.

So I can really recommend you trying pixi. You can even mix dependencies from pypi.org with the ones from Conda so for most cases you really get the best of both worlds. Also the maintainers are really nice and responsive on their Discord server.