Can you detail any of these "small and large breakages" or "bit rot"?
It just doesn't jive with my experiences with any large code bases in nearly any language, python included.
This was frustrating, because I don't expect point-releases to break the standard library, let alone require a code fork to maintain cross-distro compatibility. It was disappointing, because I had never encountered such breakage from python while Guido was still in charge.