You still have the option to choose not to use a venv and risk breaking your user space.
The changes make this harder to do it by accident by encouraging use of a venv. Part of the problem is that pip install --user
is not exactly in the user space and may in fact break system packages, and as you wrote, the user shouldn’t be able to inadvertently change the OS.
Which you can still do. That said, the “correct” and less problematic way of installing packages should be easier than the alternative.