It stopped being just a packaging tool the day our onboarding doc got shorter instead of longer.Three weeks into a new ML platform job, I asked a coworker why the 'getting started' doc had a section called 'If conda breaks, try the alternative.' He laughed in a way that told me it wasn't a joke. Every new hire spent their first two days fighting Python versions, CUDA driver mismatches, and a vector database that someone had installed locally in 2022 and nobody dared touch. We had four individuals on the team, each with distinct working setups, and "it works on my machine" was no longer a mere punchline; it had become a regular agenda item during our daily standup meetings.