> To me, having to get my "house in order" without asking for it is basically non-consensual changes by the developer, and I think that is abusive.
If you used Python 2 in a way where encoding errors wouldn't be an issue, and if you used the Python 2 to 3 conversion tool that they made when they released Python 3, then in most cases you didn't have to do any work beyond that. ...if however you used the tool and suddenly your code threw exceptions then, more often than not, the errors were errors you needed to fix anyway, even if converting to Python 3 wasn't something you wanted to do. And they gave you 11 years for making the transition between the release of Python 3.0 and the last release of Python 2.7.
I don't agree with that analogy about an abusive relationship.
It's more like a five-star restaurant asking you to please put on a shirt if you show up there in a bathing suit. It's just a norm, in this case cultural, that comes with five-star restaurants. If you don't want to follow it, you're free to go find a beach cafe somewhere.
