The toy experiment is how to do what's trivial in Node with Python. Mainly because I like working with python. I think the answer might be: Python is the wrong tool for the job.
The simplest solution is to use a small DB system like sqlite. It is built into Python (import sqlite3) performs reasonably well and you do not have to run an additional service.
Now if a small DB like sqlite already feels overblown to you (and it really is simple and small) you might not need concurrent access either, so the simplest solution is to just use a file where you store your state.
What you're referring to works equally well in the single-process case for both.
Python is excellent for toy implementations, and real ones too in many cases.
https://github.com/mkj/wort-templog/blob/master/web/templog.... is my not-quite-toy example - a single process runs from uwsgi with Bottle (like Flask) and gevent. The long polling waits on a global Event variable that's updated by another request, nice and simple.
If you were going to share state in memory between threads, how would you handle the case where the second request goes to a different server or that the process has restarted? You'd need redis anyway, so you might as well just use it in all cases.