The walrus operator is nice, except in comprehensions. f-strings are great, except for the `=` debugging operator. Dictionary merging and update operators contradict the "one way to do it" with weird and confusing syntax that's completely redundant to methods that already exist.
Type hints are a sore spot for me. They're good enough when you just don't remember whether an argument is an object or a string, for example, but once you start type hinting deep into data structures, your hints become a mangled soup of nonsense for basically no real benefit. Typing errors are a rare occurrence—perhaps once a year in most projects—yet we clutter our codebases with verbosity to satisfy type checkers instead of prioritizing clarity for developers.
There's a lot that's just straight up redundant. Dicts are ordered now, but is OrderedDict deprecated? No, because it's just slightly different in weird and mostly unimportant ways. `frozenset` is a builtin, for all 3 programmers worldwide who use it. Python resisted match/case syntax for decades, but when it finally arrived, it did so in a way that’s anything but standard—good luck figuring it out without consulting the documentation.
Obviously some improvements are real. Every new version of Python brings valuable enhancements. But just go back to Python as it used to be -- pseudocode that runs. That's just not true anymore. The simplicity has slipped away and will never ever come back.
And the standard library? A very real problem, right now, in computer security is the software supply chain. Remember polyfill from like, yesterday? This is the era when we should double down on having a million dependencies from all over GitHub, from unknown developers with no commitment, because ... npm's hellscape is a model to follow?
I would argue the contrary. There's dependency hell, of course, but there's also dependency risk. If you were evaluating a product right now, and you saw its lockfile depended only on a specific version of the Python Standard Library, that gives you exactly 1 product to evaluate, exactly 1 team of developers to depend on. pip is great and all, but dependency resolvers have quietly let in a hundred trojan horses and a thousand unmaintained dependencies into tons of projects, and no one noticed it was even happening.
Python in 2005, when everyone depended on the standard library, was a safer place than npm is today.