I am wondering why the official documentation of conda does not mention anything about the command conda env?
That makes me wonder if it would be possible to do every operation of conda env with the commands listed here and which one is recommended to use in practice. Right now I would assume that conda env creates an easy way to manipulate and work with conda environments.
The reason why the conda env commands are not similarly documented is historical.
Namely, after conda was developed, others then developed an add-on package called conda-env that provided some convenience methods for operating on whole environments rather than package operations within environments. Eventually, the conda-env package was integrated directly into the conda package, but apparently there was never any systematic effort to unify the documentation. Instead, most of the high-level documentation on using conda env commands is found under the "Managing environments" section of the Conda documentation.
As an end user, I typically use conda env for creating (from YAML), archiving/serializing (to YAML), and deleting whole environments.
More directly, the documentation for conda env is consulted with
$ conda env --help
usage: conda-env [-h] {create,export,list,remove,update,config} ...
positional arguments:
{create,export,list,remove,update,config}
create Create an environment based on an environment file
export Export a given environment
list List the Conda environments
remove Remove an environment
update Update the current environment based on environment file
config Configure a conda environment
optional arguments:
-h, --help Show this help message and exit.
and documentation of individual subcommands can be similarly consulted with conda env <subcommand> --help.