> I didn't say environment variables weren't commonly used. I'm talking about the specific functionality this issue is about.

This is likely true, to most people venv is black magic.  That doesn't mean that people wouldn't use it if the functionality existed though.  In fact this the first example given by virtualenvwrapper https://virtualenvwrapper.readthedocs.io/en/latest/scripts.html#example-usage

I personally don't use virtualenvwrapper because you they use a centralized list of env's which is non-starter for me.  I maintain dozens of envs (one per project, sometimes one per branch). So one big list would be a nightmare.

> I'm talking about the code to set, reset your custom environment variables - where is that already existent across all shells?

My point is that this code is not really different than the code to set PYTHONPATH.

> I'm not saying what you want is unreasonable - it's just putting it into the stdlib this way that I'm not sure about.

Is there an architecture that would be less objectionable?

> I mentioned on python-ideas and opened https://bugs.python.org/issue37354 to actually make the Activate.ps1 file static for security purposes.

I am curious how you plan to achieve this without reducing the functionality of venv?