There are working CUDA Docker images that work both on Windows and Linux for stable diffusion so the package including dependencies already exists. It's just they the standard packaging method doesn't work well on Apple hardware.
Just don't mess up your system. The tutorial linked works perfectly fine in a clean python environment.
That XKCD is more about messing up your system by not knowing what you're doing but randomly following shitty tutorials which suggest stuff that collide with each other... Python's only fault in this is that it's a simple language and thus attracts people who aren't software engineers (students and math majors) and thus mostly don't know or care how to keep your system clean but love writing tutorials.
It's pretty easy to keep your pythons clean, don't use conda, never run pip with sudo, never run pip with --user..., never run pip outside a virtualenv (a good safety measure for that is to have pip point to nothing in your user shell, you can access system python with python3/pip3 if needed)... To check your python is clean, create a new environment and run pip freeze, it should output nothing.
pyenv is a non-destructive system for managing multiple pythons and virtualenvs (all pythons and envs get installed into ~/.pyenv), pip is a good system for distributing dependencies (when library authors don't skip out on providing binary wheels, and software authors use pip freeze to generate requirements.txt files).
If your solution is “spend a lot of time learning a lot of rules and make sure you never accidentally do something you shouldn’t” then your solution is fragile and shitty.
You know what’s radically simpler? Shipping your damn dependencies so all any user needs to do is double-click the launcher and it will always work no matter what weird and bad things your user as done. The fact that “keep your system clean” is a thing anyone thinks about ever is a catastrophic failure.
stable diffusion is a work of researchers, not engineers, it's not a released product, it's an attachment to a research paper... researchers shouldn't need to know anything about releasing a software product...
you see it here on hacker news, because it's open source and thus hackers can and do already play with it..
as it's an interesting piece of software, I'm pretty sure someone will eventually make an easy to use GUI app based on it that ships all dependencies, but it's not yet at that stage,
this article is literally about the first easy (for a software engineer who knows python) way to run it on M1 macs, these people literally just discovered which versions of their dependencies work and share their work to invite other people to help them build something on top of it....
Python is pretty much innocent here.