No it doesn’t, the „fluff“ is there for a reason. requirements.txt is either the project file (with loose version constraints), or a lock file (with pinned versions), but never both. Updating specific dependencies by a given rule automatically is also quite helpful. Should I mention the clean separation between your own dependencies and transitive ones? Often the contents of requirements.txt are generated with pip freeze, which is borderline unmaintainable. And not long ago pip didn’t even have true conflict resolution, which is probably the biggest reason why tools like pipenv and poetry were created.

Then there’s management of your package/project itself as well as of the venv. Sure, there are other commands for that, but having it managed by your project manager automatically is just less work. Same for building and publishing your package. Sure, there is setup.py, but it sucks. And I think pyproject.toml files are still not fully supported by pip? Leaving you with a split between that one and (potentially multiple) requirements.txt files.

Everything (except for the conflict resolution) is also achievable without a real package manager. But it ranges from „mildly bothering“ over „tedious“ to „so annoying you simply won’t do it regularly“ (like updating single dependencies in a requirements.txt generated by pip freeze). And the counter argument is… what exactly? Running a single additional install command in your Docker build to use tool more sophisticated than pip? That’s your dealbreaker?

I don’t know, maybe you’re a data scientist / engineer? Or you build small single purpose microservices? Because I can see how pip is enough for you if you only have a few direct dependencies anyway and you’re not publishing a package yourself.  But create anything with a few more dependencies which probably have overlapping transitive dependencies, maybe different categories of dependencies (dev, test, docs, extras, whatever), possibly build and publish the whole thing as a python package yourself? Yeah, hard pass on pip.