The drama was surrounding false advertising so to speak. Pipenv promised a lot but did not quite deliver, much like the earlier days of MongoDB. But more importantly, it pretended or at least heavily implied it was an official PSF-affiliated project, when it was not. How that claim was substantiated was also subject to drama.
It also had no releases for over a year, even though the master branch was getting frequent updates and the performance of the last release was atrocious (and I'm not sure if it has improved much).
https://github.com/pypa/pipenv/issues/2228
This is one of the most ridiculous issues I've read. If the rest of the "drama" is like that, then eh.