ansible is not looking at the collections defined in the collections-path in ansible.cfg

Question

I have local collections folder in my ansible playbook folder. I also configured the path in the ansible.cfg.

cat ansible.cfg
[defaults]
collections_paths = ./ansible_collections

But when I run the playbook, it uses the path from python site-packages

/Users/user1/opt/miniconda3/lib/python3.9/site-packages/ansible_collections

I am running

ansible 2.10.11
  config file = /Users/user1/Documents/work/scripts/ansible-repo/ansible.cfg
  configured module search path = ['/Users/user1/.ansible/plugins/modules', '/usr/share/ansible/plugins/modules']
  ansible python module location = /Users/user1/opt/miniconda3/lib/python3.9/site-packages/ansible
  executable location = /Users/user1/opt/miniconda3/bin/ansible
  python version = 3.9.1 

As part of the debugging the playbook run, I deleted the collections under site-packages and my playbook started to fail.

ansible-playbook run with detailed debug shows

  Using module file /Users/user1/opt/miniconda3/lib/python3.9/site-packages/ansible_collections/arista/eos/plugins/modules/eos_command

ansible-galaxy collection list shows both the local collections and the collections under site-packages.

In the playbook, my task uses FQCN. For example arista.eos.eos_facts:

I have also manually set the ANSIBLE_COLLECTIONS_PATH variable.

env | grep ANSIBLE_COLLECTIONS_PATH
ANSIBLE_COLLECTIONS_PATHS=/Users/user1/Documents/work/scripts/ansible-repo/ansible_collections