It might not be supported by the consortium, but python2 still lives, slowly, in one place or another:

> The RHEL 8 AppStream Lifecycle Page puts the end date of RHEL 8's Python 2.7 package at June 2024.

https://access.redhat.com/solutions/4455511

At this point in RHEL it is only "deprecated", not "obsolete".

In RHEL I would never touch system python at all, and would install what every version I needed in a venv and configure any software I installed to use what ever version I needed. I learned the hard way to never mess with system python.