There's quite a bit more than just the unittest removals
https://docs.python.org/dev/whatsnew/3.12.html#removed
An example of a more recent deprecation is the 'distutils' module which was deprecated in 3.10.
https://docs.python.org/dev/whatsnew/3.12.html#removed
An example of a more recent deprecation is the 'distutils' module which was deprecated in 3.10.
distutils was functionally deprecated long before that. Even the Python 2.7 documentation (released in 2010!) recommended that users avoid distutils and use setuptools instead: https://docs.python.org/2.7/library/distutils.html
Last I checked, there was no good way to package hand-written Python/C extensions than setuptools, but that was a couple of years ago.
In any case, there's a large installed-based of setuptools-based projects making it hard to get rid of.