namedtuple could be implemented without exec/eval, and nowadays, it almost is.

This is the only part left that uses it, to create the constructor: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Lib/collection...

Even there it's not strictly necessary. You could accomplish the same thing with a variadic function that does its own argument parsing, it'd just be slower and not play as well with reflection. So you could port it to a Python implementation without eval().