...I agree, it's pretty obvious that this thread has gotten to the point where particulars don't matter any more.

As I recall, "bytes" didn't exist in Python 2.5 but were brought in in later versions of Python 2.6 and Python 2.7 when Python 3 already existed to provide a more continuous upgrade path for those still on version 2. You could get in the habit of using "unicode" and "bytes" and then the switch to Python 3 would be this "just renaming" thing. ...but that was the end point of the process, not the starting point.

I'm not an unreflected Python fanboy. I don't like many of the new developments since version 3.5. But I've spent 2003-2018 with Python as my main language, and 2018-2022 being forced to use Perl 5. And that has left me with the impression that Python fixed pretty much all of what was wrong with Perl 5 in a way that the Perl-community itself never managed and doing Perl 5 instead of Python 3 in 2022 is basically all downside, no upside.

I also admire how well the switch from Python 2 to Python 3 was executed, compared to how poorly Perl is doing in the switch to Perl 6.

I predict that the Python community is going to fall apart over the next 10 years over feature creep and losing its identity, trying to be all things to all people, with people subsetting it in different ways to get to a sane subset of the language, similar to how people are doing with C++.