I can comment on the Homebrew situation of miniconda. It's not as bad as it may appear.
However, about a month ago one user here at NOAA/PMEL had problems with this arrangement after an update. He ended up removing Miniconda to do a complete fresh reinstall, only to discover the miniconda recipe in Homebrew no longer existed.
Actually, it didn't disappear, but one of the following two happened (I don't remember which):
1. The name of the miniconda package was changed.
2. It was moved from "Cask" to the regular repository.
Probably it was 1.
Homebrew has the propensity of doing 1 or 2 from time to time, not only for miniconda but also for all sorts of packages.
This seems upsetting, but it's not a big deal. You you can always search (brew search miniconda) and you can always delete obsolete packages (brew rm miniconda3).
So, the situation isn't serious at all (for those who don't use miniconda for other purposes than for pyferret), because a clean install of pyferret is super easy. You just delete your old miniconda package through homebrew and start over.
But as Ryo mentioned, creating a script to do the conda activate and then add any additional paths to the environment variables is an excellent idea (there is also an example in that README.md file).
The only job for the user is to find out where miniconda is installed, which can change when Homebrew changes the miniconda package. Fortunately it's always under /usr/local (unless you configure Homebrew to use a different directory/folder). Currently it's /usr/local/miniconda , which is the most straightforward place.
Hope this helps.
Regards,
Ryo