I don’t know where that quote came from, though I recognise parts of it from one of my earlier posts.
We were just arguing about changes to the reference counting macros for this release - why are you now saying that they’ve been functions for the last year? Victor only just proposed changing them all over. But the reference count saturation has gone into macros, so anything built with 3.12 targeting an earlier version is going to check for saturation when run on those earlier versions.
But yeah, most of my perception was developed around the 3.5 era when the functions available according to the headers, python3.dll and POSIX didn’t match up at all. We’ve made a lot of progress since then, but anyone who was trying to use it at that point will have hit issues and might have figured out that only using it for forward compatibility was the safest way.
(One big advantage on Windows at least is that linking to python3.dll instead of python3X.dll` can actually be loaded in other versions. Everything else is runtime-failure level of subtle.)