You are having a rather simple ETL task at hand that clearly doesn't justify incorporating another language like Python/Pandas.
Given the limited information you are sharing I would imagine to use a separate mapping table for your categories and then merge that one with your original table. And eventually you only keep the columns you are interested in.
E.g. this mapping or translation table has 2 columns: OLD and NEW. Then you merge this mapping table with your data table such that OLD equals your Description column (the GUI will help you with that) and then expand the newly generated column. Finally rename the columns you want to keep and remove all the rest. This is way more efficient than 100 replacements.
Newbie in Power BI/Power query and python.  I hope to ask this question succinctly.
I have a "primary" query in PBI but need to change the values of one column (categories) based on the values in the (description) column.  I feel there is a better solution than a new conditional if/else column, or ReplaceReplacer.text in M Code.
An I idea I had was to create a list or query of all values in (description) that need to have their category changed , and somehow use python to iterate through the (description) list and when it finds a value in (description), it knows to drop the new value into category.
I've googled extensively but can't find that kind of "loop" that I can drop a python script into Power Query/Power BI.
What direction should I be heading in, or am I asking the right questions?  I'd appreciate any advice!
John
Replace values in power query column using python?