I’m constantly fighting Brew on all three computers where Brew is installed. Yes, I have wiped them, the problem is Brew, it is not the particular installation. If it were a problem with one particular installation of Brew, then it would not suddenly become a problem on a new fresh install of Brew.
The idea that you would need to wipe anything to start over is just bizarre to me in the first place. One of the many problems with Brew. Brew is extremely slow and it is prone to doing things that I do not want it to do without explaining why it is doing them or how I can alter its behavior (why is it installing package X? why is it updating right now?). Sometimes when I install a package, I get a spurious failure, and I need to re-run the installation command. Sometimes I just want to install one package, but it goes through “brew update”—which is extremely slow.
I used brew for years and it's a fine tool but I found it lacking. It doesn't give you control when you need it, and telling a user that something got b0rked along the way and asking them to start over isn't good developer experience (in all fairness, neither is the current status of the various nix cli's, but trade-offs am I right?). I've lost so many hours because something broke and sometimes it was because one dependency got updated and broke other packages and other times it wasn't obvious what broke, and I would have to start from scratch.
I never used brew to install or manage my python precisely because it gave me so many issues.
