It's the trend that is a bit worrying. It's definitely been floated more than once that the stdlib should be fundamentally gutted. It has not become a reality yet, but there are some loud voices advocating to just chuck most modules as a principle into pypi.

"Trend"? Python has dropped quite a few modules over the decades.

"gl", "sgi", "fl", "sunaudiodev", "audioop", "stdwin", "rotor", "poly", "whatsound", "gopherlib" .. the list goes on.

Some of these were dropped with 1.6 (see "Obsolete Modules" at https://www.python.org/download/releases/1.6/ ). Some with 3.0 (see https://docs.python.org/3.10/whatsnew/2.6.html for then-upcoming removals.)

There are two strong reasons for that:

(1) Not letting little used modules that pose maintenance problems drive up the cost of maintaining Python, and

(2) Not forcing actively used, actively developed modules to be limited to the core language upgrade cadence (and not forcing users to upgrade the language to get upgrades to the modules.)

Ruby I think has a decent approach to this (particularly, one that deals with #2 better than just evicting things entirely from the standard distribution) with “Gemification” of the standard library, where most things that are moved out of the standard library aren’t moved out of the standard distribution, but into a set of gems distributed with the standard distribution but which can be upgraded independently.

Maybe I've been out of the loop for the past couple of years since I've been writing less Python and don't follow Twitter drama, but IIRC none of the "stdlib is where module goes to die" crowd has ever advocated a fundamental gutting of the existing stable and widely used modules in PSL.

I was referring to this: https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-python-language-sum...

Of course nobody even knew so the default response is to hit that bottom arrow :D

"Had possibly been added before it was fully baked" is not the same as "we should never have added anything like it", and neither is "we have a much better solution but no one uses that because asyncio is in stdlib which we're now stuck with, for better or worse".

Your entire reading of that is just wrong.