Guess the community (or a company like RedHat) will have to step in and fork 2.7. There is no way that people who haven't switched, will want to switch, unless absolutely forced to (for example: no security patches).
I just hope those same people have used the past years to do calculate the cost of moving to Python 3 vs the cost of Python 2 support. Expecting Python 2 support to be free or even easy is delusional/selfish though.
Expecting that everyone will just hop over Python 3 because one group of people doesn't want to maintain Python 2 anymore is delusional.
Displaced senior devs will find themselves making nice paychecks at other shops with obsolete codebases, at least until those CFOs start to notice a funny line item in the engineering budget...
None of this has happened yet.
What is going to make 2.7 so unmaintainable? It’s there, it works and what is going to change that?
There are valid reasons for using 2.7 today. I think it's professional negligence to not at least be planning for the inevitable upgrade to the current version. Honestly, it's almost never as hard as you'd think. The most common hurdles are str/bytes incompatibility, and 3.x only reveals those problems where they already exist in 2.x (where the code is quite possibly not working as expected but silently passing wrong data without warning you).
Who even pays for a support contract for programming language that’s already done?
That’s like saying JavaScript is unusable because of all of the different versions. Nobody has to pay anybody to use ES3 even though it’s largely obsolete.
It's easy to forget that Python 2 was supposed to have been deprecated in 2015, but that got pushed back until 2020. Personally, I don't feel like backporting security fixes forever.
I think it's unlikely that the community will bring support. Most of the community already jumped to 3.x, and those who haven't will do in the next two years. Also, supporting legacy code is not something that volunteers love to do.
And this is perhaps the Achilles heel of FOSS in the long run...
What we can do, as the people who live in the present, is educate programming/python newbies to use the newer/better Python 3, instead of clinging to something that will soon lose official support (for AFAIK good reasons).
And yet there are tons of lines on COBOL in active use today. What makes you think 2.7 code, which powers tons of businesses, is going anywhere?
I also expect major RHEL versions released after Python 2.7 is EOL to not come with Python 2.7 anymore.
That is, if RHEL 8 is released before the Python 2.7 EOL, and RHEL 9 is released after the Python 2.7 EOL, I expect RHEL 8 to come with both Python 2.7 and Python 3, with RedHat supporting both until RHEL 8 support ends, but RHEL 9 to come with only Python 3; so once RHEL 8 dies, RedHat has no reason to support Python 2.7 anymore.