[pas]

Yes, ok, thanks, the Python foundation will immediately spend a lot of time and money to support releases for 2 decades. How could they not know!? /s

That out of the way, you're right that some niches require a lot longer cycles, but it's the big big biiiig advantage of FOSS. Downstream can maintain it for as long as they wish. As you said things got shaken out by the community for free basically, and if some serious software is so so serious that upgrading and retesting/certifying is somehow more expensive than trying to airgap an EOLed pile of libs (while at the same time it needs support) then the stakeholders can do it.

[xorcist]

No sarcasm needed, Red Hat happily invests time and money in supporting it until 2024.

That might have been an easy eay to provide upstream releases too, had the Python maintainers not been intent on using deprecations as an instrument to get the community moving.

That strategy doesn't work very well however, as we've seen when TLS 1.2 was held off from Python 2.