I wonder why OrderedDict isn't outright deprecated (or reimplemented as a trivial wrapper over dict).

You can get the first/last key of a 3.8 dict with dict.keys() and reversed(dict.keys()) which you can then delete to reimplement OrderedDict.popitem.

Deleting a key and reinserting it will let you reimplement move_to_end.

The only cool thing that OrderedDict's implementation might be useful for is to move to front (or anywhere else not the back) but it doesn't expose that api.