That's the usual case, but it can definitely also happen because of the language - see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51337939 .

> There was previous discussions about uncoupling the stdlib (python libraries) from the release and have them being released independently, but I can’t remember why that died off

This sort of thing is mainly a social problem.

Well yes, but sometimes the features provided by stdlib can feel pretty 'core'. I remember that how dataclasses work for example changed and broke a lot of our code when we upgraded from 3.8 to 3.10,

There have also been breaking changes in the C API. We have one project at work that is stuck at 3.11 since a third party dependency won't build on 3.12 without a rewrite.