"Milk tea has gained worldwide popularity in the recent years (Wu, 2020). It refers to an umbrella term encompassing all beverages sold in milk tea shops, such as milk tea, fruit tea, floral tea, bubble tea, and others."
So essentially "bubble tea" shops (but not limited to tapioca-based drinks).
As a software dev, I like using whatever as a local env but SSH'ing into something more powerful to perform any heavy lifting. There's also tools like VSCode Remote that make it almost like developing locally. That said, the most taxing tools that I use regularly are things like video conferencing and "collaboration" tools like Miro. These things are hell.
The pyproject.toml is telling you what should work in terms of a range of package versions and the poetry.lock is telling you what my environment is in terms of exactly what is installed. You don't need the lock file, but without it there is no guarantee of what it will install so it may not be completely compatible.
Have you ever seen how many authors are on a research paper? Research in most disciplines is not some lone person at a bench doing experiments, it's a collection of people looking at previous work, generating new ideas, and testing them. People like to downplay effective teamwork as "office politics" but the best research comes not only from intelligence or "merit" but also from the ability to work effectively with others.