Using Mercurial via pip on Ubuntu 20.04, any negative side-effects I should be expecting?

Question

I'm trying to get rid of the last Python 2.x bits on my Ubuntu 20.04 boxes and it turns out the mercurial package is the culprit.

Having already had some negative experiences with the packaged version of Mercurial in the past, I though I could simply install python3-pip and then do the sudo python3 -m pip install mercurial routine.

The binary ends up in /usr/local/bin/hg instead of /usr/bin/hg, but I guess it's okay for most purposes.

Questions:

1. should I have to expect any negative side-effects as long as I stay clear of packaged mercurial and friends (i.e. packages directly related to it)?
   • As an extension of this, should I use equivs-build (package equivs) to build myself a dummy that will artificially conflict with mercurial?
2. can I use dpkg-divert at all to symlink the hg binary into the well-known path (/usr/bin/hg)? Or will this only actually work if my dummy package takes care of it? Since I am using hg via SSH I am afraid that there is a chance the hg binary won't be found (Mercurial works by establishing an SSH tunnel and invoking hg to communicate via std{in,err,out} with the client) ...