"Glyph" knows. He has been in the Python inner circle for decades back to when the circle promoted "spam and eggs" and "consenting adults".

Like the rest of that circle, he moves with the times, supports public shaming of Tim Peters and others and now promotes poorly implemented information hiding so Python ticks a few more boxes for the industry.

Information hiding in a language that allows changing the values of small integers at runtime via ctypes is doomed anyway. And there are plenty of better languages that do it out of the box and in a straightforward manner.