Do you have examples of "just use python 2" still being a thing in 2024?
2 is stable and does not change from under you. Which is what you want in a programming langiuage
The general state of ML code is abysmal, as it attracts a lot of inexperienced developers, and Python's duck/relaxed typing spirit makes it easy to write incomprehensible code with megabytes of unnecessary or bloated dependencies.
It's not bad per se, the amount of innovation is impressive, but a lot of it is a castle of cards, from low level libraries to end-user software.