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After some more fiddling, I've found the solution to my problem.

Sage's built-in version of Python will look, by default, without any prompting from environmental variables (as you can see from the list of environmental variables dumped above) took look in the ~/.local directory. If a .local exists for some reason and includes various python packages, SAGE will attempt to load them during the build process instead of the packages it has compiled as part of its build. I'm unsure if this is the intended behavior of the build process.

As a side note I have no recollection of ever creating or putting anything in the .local directory. Its removal had subsequently no visible effect on my local python installation.