IINM the reference implementation has a cache for small integers. I wonder what happens if you try the ctypes example in the article with one of the cached integers.
https://kate.io/blog/2017/08/22/weird-python-integers/ http://hforsten.com/redefining-the-number-2-in-python.html
I found these offhand, but I'm pretty sure I saw this trick earlier than 2017.