As someone who writes both Python and Go (and I've been using Python professionally since 2005), I remember that the scoping behaviour has changed.

Back in Python 2.1 days, there was no guarantee that a locally scoped variable would continue to exist past the end of the method. It was not guaranteed to vanish or go fully out of scope, but you could not rely on it being available afterwards. I remember this changing from 2.3 onwards (because we relied on the behaviour at work) - from that point onwards you could reliably "catch" and reuse a variable after the scope it was declared in had ended, and the runtime would ensure that the "second use" maintained the reference count correctly. GC did not get in the way or concurrently disappear the variable from underneath you anymore.

Then from 2008 onwards the same stability was extended to more complex data types. Again, I remember this from having work code give me headaches for yanking supposedly out-of-scope variable into thin air, and the only difference being a .1 version difference between the work laptop (where things worked as you'd expect) and the target SoC device (where they didn't).