Otoh, if you don't put your local path first, you can't override system binaries that you want to override.

Also, if something can write into your path, it can probably write to your shell config and/or the environment variables.

All sorts of utilities push themselves to the front of path: uv, mise, asdf, python virtual environments, nix shell, etc.

It is a theoretically nice ideal that fails immediately when you want project specific overrides.

AFAIK it's habit to allow your scripts to override system ones, so you can customize behavior.

I've always seen home dir, homebrew, etc prepending to PATH.

That's important only for the people that add relative names (like '.') to their path.

Most people know better.

by that time it's too late and should have been prevented appearing on the host much earlier