> There was always a clear way forward and people were actually moving.

I was always of the impression that people were very reluctant to move even though the benefits were clear and the movement not nearly as difficult as people claimed. But I still hear people complain about, for example, how you can't run CPython 2.x bytecode on a modern CPython runtime even though you can't run CPython 3.13 bytecode on a CPython 3.14 runtime, either and that hasn't slowed anyone down at all.

> the movement not nearly as difficult as people claimed.

Original was really rough because the core team had gone in the wrong direction on migration, and the Python io module was hell as well.

By 3.3-3.4 it was relatively smooth sailing but that took a lot of work from the community and core team both (reminder that Python 2.7 was released after 3.1, backporting a number of features to make compatibility easier, and old features were reintroduced as late as 3.5).