As someone who has been extremely critical of the Python 3 debacle, even I think this is overdone. Yes, the transition was totally botched, and 8 years in, Python 3 still has less production usage than Python 3. But by now, at least, enough libraries have been ported or replaced that you can actually use Python 3. This was not true three years ago. Porting remains painful. I ported a medium-sized web backend system about two years ago. I found lots of bugs which should have been found and fixed long before, indicating that some standard packages were not being used much.

As for "Machiavellian Python maintainers", that's real. There have been explicit attempts to apply pain to Python 2.7 users. This has decreased since von Rossum got stuck maintaining Python 2.7 code at Dropbox as his day job.