Check my comment alongside yours, I got Conda to work but it did require the pre-requisite Homebrew packages you originally recommended before it would cooperate :)
I couldn't get the setup process working until I switched the python distro to 3.10, as the scripts were relying on typings features that were added in 3.10 even though the yml file specified 3.9. Was strange.
We struggled to get Conda working reliably for people, which it looks like lstein's fork recommends. I'll see if we can get it working with plain pip.