I think you are missing the key point here: I don't write a ton of Python. I don't write any Python. Of course you think this is old news. You write a lot of Python. You're totally plugged in. You've known this is coming, this inside baseball is "the thing" for you. My point is that, believe it or not, the rest of the world does not keep up to date with whatever the Python community is doing. This is not unique to Python. Most people in dev community X are not aware of what is happening in dev community Y. What is unique to Python is that all of a sudden we were forced to become aware as the downstream apps began to break. By creating a backwards compatibility issue in an interpreted language, you necessarily "backload" the end-user pain to when the apps, which by definition are updated later than the code within the apps, begin to break as packages are removed from package managers, or things are EOL'ed, etc. This is a situation that I can honestly not remember happening with any other language. I can't remember any other circumstance, and certainly not one where it proceeded to happen repeatedly, where I've been abruptly made aware that utilityX was written in a no-longer-supported version of C/perl/whatever (when I previously didn't even know what language it was), after I had been running it for ages.